


Beyond the End of the Line

by nagapdragon



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alpha Bucky Barnes, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, M/M, Mpreg, News Media, Omega Steve, briefly though - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 22:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5266922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagapdragon/pseuds/nagapdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers wakes to a world unlike the one he left: a world in which, thanks to his fame, omegas work side by side with alphas and betas and where Captain America has become far more than Steve Rogers can hope to be. He wakes to a world where it's been two weeks going on seventy years since his bond broke, but he's still feeling the effects of his loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond the End of the Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [poplarpando](https://archiveofourown.org/users/poplarpando/gifts).



> This began a long, long time ago as a response to poplarpando's prompt for the Omega Steve Fic Exchange about Hollywood and the media dealing with Steve, and then, uh, this happened. So I'm waaay off prompt, but I hope you like it anyways!

_In 1918, the Spanish influenza ravaged the world and the Russian Civil War brought with it the execution of deposed Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family. New York’s worst subway accident kills 92 and injures 100 after a train jumps a track at five times the speed limit. Exterminator won the Kentucky Derby, Boston took the World Series, and Toronto took the Stanley Cup. And, perhaps most significantly of all, a sickly baby boy is born to a widowed mother in Brooklyn._

_Little is known about Steve Rogers’ youth. He grew up in a poor part of Brooklyn during the Great Depression and his surviving medical records are extensive, to say the least. His friendship with James Buchanan Barnes is the stuff of legends: childhood friends separated by the war only to be reunited on the battlefield._

_Most of what we know about Rogers’ youth comes from either propaganda or from the surviving drawings left behind when he went to war. He drew alphas in scuffed shoes and patched skirts, children playing in the streets, the same images that grace photos and memoirs from the era. There are no images of Rogers himself, though some of his more poignant drawings are seen as if through a window. More surprisingly, even in the Barnes Collection- the largest collection of Rogers’ work, curated by one Ms. Rebecca Barnes- there are no images of Bucky Barnes._

 

**_-Captain Steven G. Rogers, A Retrospective: The Man Who Shaped the Century_ **

 

_***_

 

This is his city.

He wanders the streets in modern civilian clothes, familiarizing himself with the city he died to save. It’s a masked version on the same city he once knew, where the gleaming facades of glass and steel go only as far as the filthy alleyways of chipped brick and broken bottles. More dangers lurk behind the shark-toothed smiles of the Wall Street brokers than the poor side of the city, where gentrification draws deeper divides between the haves and the have-nots than the worst days of the Depression.

This is not his city. 

Cupcake shops and cafés and artisan shops of a thousand kinds line streets that used to be homes and groceries and tiny family-owned restaurants. Billboards flash advertisements in Manhattan of scantily clad omegas with arched backs and bedroom eyes selling everything from cologne to cars to coffee while in Queens an omega who can’t get heat suppressants is expected to want all the alpha attention that entails. Liberation has become expectation. 

He tugs his hat down to shade his face as he walks by street art of Captain America, hiding his modern haircut. No children dash over with calls of _Captain America, Captain America_ , their parents chasing behind them. No paparazzi hide around every corner with cameras in hand, the very sight of him bringing out every phone and every camera in the vicinity. He was hounded relentlessly the first few times he tried to venture into the city, his face plastered all over the papers from the Battle of New York and his subsequent public resurrection.

Anonymity.

It’s entirely the doing of Tony Stark’s credit card and Natasha Romanoff’s ability to hide in plain sight, giving him a new haircut and a new wardrobe that make him blend in with the crowd. She dressed him in tweed jackets and dark-wash jeans, intentionally scuffed brown leather shoes and a matching leather bag, finishing it off with glasses he doesn’t need and instructions to grow out his beard. He walks seen but unseen, remarked upon but unnoticed, allowed to be Steve Rogers instead of Captain America for the first time since he crashed the _Valkyrie_ in the ice. 

And so he wanders and he watches.

He watches people shout at employees who scurry ceaselessly from table to table and throw their drinks on them, watches the same employees blot at the spots with paper towel for a mere moment before turning on a too-bright smile and apologizing to their other customers about the delay. He watches omegas cross the street to avoid alphas and betas in the late evening. He cultivates a modest Instagram following- how Stark managed to get him _captainrogers_ , he doesn’t really want to know- and he posts old pictures and sketches of things he remembers alongside their modern equivalents. 

He watches omegas in modest clothing be called prudish traditionalists and omegas in revealing clothes be called sluts and all of them be called anti-Liberation by the others. Traditionalists cry out _what would Captain America do?_ and revolutionaries cry for _the change Steve Rogers would’ve wanted_ and none of them seem particularly interested in asking _him_ what _he_ would or wouldn’t do. Steve may be invisible, just a name on the credit card the cashiers never so much as glance at, and he hasn’t made a single public appearance since the press fiasco after the Battle of New York, but Captain America is very much a _presence_ in his city, in his country. He watches long enough to see that Captain America isn’t just a legend, like SHIELD would like him to believe. 

Captain America is a brand.

“Steve Rogers,” the barista reads off his credit card, glancing up with a raised eyebrow and a grin. “Any relation?”

This is one of the coffee shops where every single mug bears either some picture of him or a quote that, correctly or not, has been attributed to him. Barton would tease him endlessly about spending an afternoon at _The Howling Coffeehouse_ , home of cookies frosted to look like his shield and nineteen kinds of beverages named after his past. Steve may or may not be partial to the Cappuccino America, complete with a rendition of his shield in the foam, and whatever bakery treat has the most chocolate AND a name he doesn’t mind saying out loud. 

“Who wouldn’t want to be Captain America,” he replies, hedging the question and accepting his pastry. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to snag that table in the corner before someone else does.”

“Go for it,” the barista waves him away. “Someone will bring your drink out. One Cappuccino America for not-quite Captain America, yeah?”

“Something like that.” Steve steps away, smile dropping when his back is to the barista. 

He always knew Captain America was a brand, that even after he was on the battlefield he was a propaganda tool. They were always hunting for chances to get pictures of Captain America and his Howling Commandos, to take video reels of them dashing across beaches with serious faces and tactfully clipping around Bucky tackling Steve into the sand. Still, it was always at a distance, since they never saw the finished product. 

He always thought he’d get to go home to Brooklyn when the war ended.

He knows now that the world will never let Captain America slip away into obscurity.

Steve curls into his seat, angled to cast his sketchbook into light and his face into shadow, and begins to draw. 

He draws the cafe’s patrons. The grandmother drinking her coffee, eyes closed in a sigh of relief while her grandchildren doodle fiercely, rendered in loving detail that captures every wrinkle in the curl of her hands around her mug. The couple on a date, the omega girl stammering every time the alpha girl blushes, trading sips of a single oversized latte and holding up cookies for each other to bite. The baristas bustling around each other with a call of _behind!_ as they make drinks, laughing and bumping hips. The emotion behind them is just as important to him as the tiny details that make them individuals: the faded grey lines of a tattoo curling beyond the grandmother’s sleeve and the way her grandchildren kneel at the coffee table with their shoulders pressed against her knees, the tentative tremble in the alpha’s hand when she reaches out to brush a few crumbs from her date’s face, the affection in the baristas’ glances when they flatten themselves against the counter to let the other by. 

This is what Steve’s good at. This, he earned all on his own, before Erskine and the serum changed everything. _You’re a lab rat, Rogers,_ Stark had said. _Everything special about you came out of a bottle._ It’s not the first time he’s heard that and he doubts it’ll be the last. This, the scratch of graphite on paper and the portrait taking shape out of blankness, was a talent cultivated in bedridden days watching the Brooklyn _live_ on the other side of fogged windows. 

Steve smells the change in patrons more than watches it as he draws, relying on that sense to keep track of his surroundings. Even as the cafe fills, patrons from the surrounding office buildings taking their coffee breaks in almost the same half hour, they avoid sitting near him until there are no other seats- scent is the first way they learn to judge each other, after all, and his is fainter than a child’s since he came out of the ice. 

The invisible man. Barton meant it as a joke, but he’s not entirely wrong. Steve certainly feels invisible when he’s out of uniform, when he’s trying to be just another person in the streets.

He gets a second drink before he settles down to draw again, confident this time that he won’t be disturbed. The second set of portraits would give him away in a way that- barring an art history scholar on the premises, and isn’t that a weird thing to think about- his previous drawings of the patrons wouldn’t. He’s made a point of trying to draw as many figures from his past as he can, committing them to paper the way he remembers them. Alannah Cleary, the alpha who battled Bucky for dominance over their little piece of the neighborhood and finally bested him when he ditched a street fight to sit with Steve while he was sick. Becca Barnes as a little girl clinging to her big brother’s knee, then again as a teenager who got into near as many scrapes as Bucky did. Samuel and Adam, twins from a block over who had the worst of crushes on Eleanor Whelan and found every excuse to be nearby. Falsworth leaning against a tree, thumbing over the necklace his mate gave him for luck, wistfulness momentarily overlaying his iron determination. Peggy focusing on a map, always perfectly put together, and he can’t resist making one of the seams on her stockings just slightly askew because there was always something she was a little too busy to notice. 

When he recognizes the curve of Bucky’s smile in an absentminded sketch, he tears out the page and closes his sketchbook. 

 

 

***

 

_Steve Rogers is many things._

_Artist. Soldier. Avenger. A nonagenarian and a twenty-something, a man who almost singlehandedly turned the tide of World War II and yet whose greatest legacy comes from the United States after his death. He’s a study in contradictions: from poverty in Brooklyn to a skyscraper in Manhattan, from illness and fragility to the peak of human abilities, from a death sentence that was a matter of when, not if, to surviving at impossible odds._

_Omega._

_It’s a tale that was destined to be legendary: the serum intended to make the perfect soldier that simply did not work as desired with the physiology of alpha or beta soldiers and the omega who was denied enlistment due to his assignation. Like all good legends, it would have gone unnoticed were it not for a bad batch of military-issue suppressants and a camp where the only thing that spread faster than secrets was gossip. The public announcement was only intended to stop the rumormongering._

_Instead, it sparked what is now called the Liberation Movement._

_On the home front, omegas had taken over work that was traditionally dominated by alphas and betas. They saw Captain America as proof that they could do anything just as well as their counterparts could and, for many omegas, they saw absolutely no reason to go back to sheltered lives of mates and children. Steve Rogers became a symbol he never expected to be and, when he sacrificed himself to save his country, the legend was born almost overnight._

_Steve Rogers is many things, and the legends about him are many more. How many are true and how many embellished over the decades since his Arctic swim, only time will tell._

 

**_-The Man and the Movement: Steven Rogers and the Omega Liberation_ **

 

_***_

 

Steve takes to running in the dark hours of the morning, his feet beating out a steady pattern on the asphalt while his iPod blares something upbeat that makes Tony grimace each time Steve puts it on the speakers in the workout room. He was never a connoisseur when it came to music- that was always Bucky’s domain- so he let Clint go wild. 

He runs a different route every day to keep it fresh and interesting, winding through the streets before they’re crowded with people and doing a few laps in Central Park for the crowds of celebrity-spotting tourists. They wake up at the crack of dawn and camp out with hot chocolate and kids dozing off in their parents’ laps just to see Captain America run by in a storm of camera flashes. People wait by the sidewalk for him to run by just to sprint next to him for a little while, see how long they can keep up, and lately some of them have brought selfie sticks that make him pick up the speed just a little bit just to frustrate them. 

It’s not the anonymity he had before Avengers publicity demanded him again, but he knew that couldn’t last forever. 

From Central Park he runs back to Avengers Tower, a chip in his shoe alerting JARVIS to open the gates for him. Every once in a while someone tries to dart in after him only to find that no, Captain America isn’t interested in some upstart alpha with _opinions_ about omegas and yes, JARVIS can distinguish between terrorists and civilians bothering Steve but sometimes, he feels the need to make a statement anyways. 

“Good morning, Captain,” JARVIS greets him. Steve likes his morning routines uninterrupted unless there’s an emergency or he calls out to JARVIS first, so JARVIS keeps his morning briefing for Steve’s return from his run. “Today is grey and overcast, with showers in the morning and evening hours.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Steve remarks, stripping out of his soaked-through tee and tossing it in the bathtub to drip for a while. He had enough of being damp in the war where they never _really_ dried off and again in the long minutes where the light from the surface dimmed as the Valkyrie sank. He shudders, tossing his pants in the bathtub and stepping into the shower cubicle that already billows with steam- Steve never thought he’d be comfortable with JARVIS knowing every detail of their habits, but the hot showers just when he wanted them changed that. 

“Currently,” JARVIS continues just loud enough to be heard over the shower, “You have no commitments for the day. Agent Romanoff has requested your presence for coffee and, if I may make a recommendation, you ought to visit a designer about your Stark Gala suit.”

Steve groans. He’d forgotten about the damn suit. Most of the events they’ve been asked to so far call for the stars and stripes, a few have required a plain suit, but Tony tossed his credit card down on the table last month and told them all that they were going to start looking good at events. It’s been bespoke suits that accent the width of his shoulders and the still narrow line of his hips, drawing attention he doesn’t particularly want, ever since. 

At least Clint and Natasha have taken it on themselves to be a buffer between him and the influx of offers from alphas and the occasional beta- _one heat, Cap, I’ll show you what you’re missing! Ninety six and looking like a twenty-something- that biological clock start tick-tick-ticking yet? One night with me and they’ll have to find a new Captain America ‘cause this one’ll be barefoot and pregnant_. 

Steve tips his head back, letting the water drip in rivulets across his face long after the shampoo rinsed out, letting the pound of the water wash away all the things people shout at him and plaster all over his photos on the internet. The water pressure in Avengers Tower is a miracle Steve doesn’t think he’ll ever get over. It’s really one of the best things to clear his head and JARVIS, in his infinite wisdom, leaves Steve alone to enjoy it once they’ve gone over his schedule. 

The other Avengers are the closest thing he has to family these days. 

It may not be _strictly_ true- legally, Rebecca Barnes is his closest living relative through Bucky, for all that his scent has dwindled down to nothing in the absence of his mate. The first time he saw her, a scant week after the Battle of New York, the familiar scent of her was almost painful in its not-quite-rightness. She has children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews, the matriarch of a whole clan of Barneses, and still she keeps his secret. They’re his family, and only she and Steve know it. 

He doesn’t see her very often. Little Becca Barnes, Bucky’s youngest sister who was so often left in Steve’s charge when Bucky was dashing around corralling his other sisters, now a grandmother while he looks young enough to be her grandson. No, the Avengers are his family now, a family of choice rather than blood.

His stomach protests his long shower, reminding him of the fading scent of bacon and coffee when he passed through the kitchen and the miles he ran this morning. He doesn’t really need to run quite as far as he does every morning- the serum maintains itself, for the most part, but he enjoys pushing past the burn of exertion without worrying about his breathing. He’s always slightly shaky and hypoglycemic by the time he returns to the Tower, his metabolism constantly outpacing the outlandish volume of food he consumes in a day, but it’s worth it. It’s always worth it. 

He dries off perfunctorily, slipping into a pair of jeans and one of the too-tight tees he can’t escape because stores are woefully unequipped for his body type. He pads barefoot into the kitchen, balancing an overfull plate of everything Natasha left out from her own breakfast and a glass of orange juice trying valiantly to spill over the edges in one hand with his sketchbook in the other. A flash of red hair through the window puts Natasha in one of the comfortable armchairs that sit shaded under an awning, her feet tucked up under her and a romance paperback in her hand. 

“Rogers.”

“Romanoff,” he greets her, letting her take his sketchbook while he eases down to the tile and leans against the front of her chair. She flicks through it idly, murmuring in appreciation over a sketch of Jane standing on top of Thor’s feet while he shows her traditional Asgardian court dances, Clint hanging from the rafters by his knees with his bow and a shit-eating grin, Natasha herself in the graceful stance of a dancer not yet in motion with a coffee mug in her hand and Clint leaning his forehead against the faint mark on the back of her neck. The portraits are desperately intimate, he thinks, full of all the affection he has for his makeshift family and the devastating loss of his own mate. He doesn’t talk about Bucky, changes the subject even in interviews, but he thinks Natasha, at least, knows. 

Her hand ghosts over the skin exposed by his tee, the low collar half-revealing the faded mark on the back of his neck. The serum didn’t erase his scars but it did fade them, leaving the imprint of Bucky’s teeth from the night before he went to war a scant shade lighter than his skin and almost smooth. The Avengers are the only ones he’d allow to see it and Natasha the only one he’d allow to touch- she’s his best friend and his family and a mated omega, no threat to the last thing he has of Bucky’s. 

“We’re going to talk about it,” she murmurs, her gentle tone belying the steel of her command. Steve stills with his fork halfway to his mouth, lowering it back to his plate with a muted clink. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Steve lies. Natasha’s nails dig in for a brief second, a warning not to lie to a consummate liar. 

“I’m not blind,” she says, all warmth and kindness against his icy reluctance. “And, for all his antics, neither is Clint. We know what separation sickness looks like and you, Rogers, are _textbook_.”

Steve slumps against her knees, tipping his head back into her lap with his eyes closed. Natasha runs her hand through his still-drying hair, making it stick up wildly, and they listen to the distant rumble of the city waking below them. It’s the closest to acquiescence that he’ll give and they both know it. She sips her coffee, keeping a steadying hand always on his shoulder or in his hair, and he breathes in the familiar scent of her. Natasha is a contradiction: the distinctly omega sweetness unmuted by suppressants and the stale scent of death twining around each other, blood and gunpowder and all the other things that cling to people who work in the places they do. Steve imagines that’s what he’d smell like by now, if he still did. 

“The scent could be mourning,” Natasha lists quietly. “So I started watching. Anyone’s distracted while they’re mourning and for us, a thoughtless mistake could mean losing a teammate. The rest of it, though… you’re pale, too pale, and anyone who looked past the muscles could see that you’re not eating enough. There’s a slight tremor in your hands that only ever eases when you handle the shield and you draw anyone and everyone except for couples with children.”

“Bucky wanted a houseful of ‘em,” Steve admits. 

“I don’t know why you still smell mated. Even if the decades in the ice didn’t count towards your mourning period, the years out of the ice should’ve.” Natasha shrugs, the motion rippling down through the rest of her body. “I don’t have answers, Rogers, but Clint and I are here for you. The others might not understand but, well, we’ve had our share of separation sickness.”

Steve opens his eyes then. Natasha’s staring out across the city, giving him as much space as she can with his head in her lap. They’ve always been like that- they call each other by their last names and pretend they mean nothing to each other because in their line of work, emotion is weakness and they’ve both suffered enough.

“Thank you, Natasha. For everything.”

“We keep each other alive, Steve. That’s what family is for.”

Steve smiles, closing his eyes in peace this time. He might take a soldier’s nap, ready to jump up at the slightest sign of trouble, or he might take his sketchbook back from Natasha and draw until Tony starts clattering around in the kitchen in search of coffee. Natasha picks her book up again, leafing through it quietly. 

“Don’t think that means Tony won’t be dragging you to the tailor today, though. I’ve got your back against aliens and terrorists and Nick Fury, but your public is fickle and demanding.”

Steve laughs. “That they are. That they are indeed.”

 

***

 

_Where do you find the most famous celebrities and the world’s most eligible all in the same room? Why, at the Maria Stark Foundation Charity Ball, of course! So, from your friends here at NBC, here’s our top ten of people to look for on tonight’s Red Carpet Coverage._

**_10._** ** _Bruce Banner_** _may not be the loudest personality on the Red Carpet, but this Avenger is not one to be underestimated. The Stark Gala two months ago saw Dr. Banner in a show-stopping teal suit that almost-_ almost _\- snuck by our reporters on the red carpet. The question isn’t if Dr. Banner will be in attendance- it’s what he’ll be wearing._

**_9.James Rhodes_ ** _is a fixture at Stark events. We’re expecting Air Force dress uniform from the Colonel and- with a little luck- our reporters will manage to pull him into an interview with Tony Stark himself._

**_8\. Sif of Asgard_ ** _is on the guest list, though whether she’ll be in attendance or off fighting frost giants in another world, nobody knows. Equally in question is her wardrobe: the Lady Sif has worn some incredible Asgardian fashion to past events, but she’s equally likely to show up in armor- sword and all._

**_7\. Jane Foster_ ** _likes the classics: little black dress, black Louboutins, and red lipstick. She’s a pioneer in astrophysics and the only living human to have been to Asgard, which makes her one of the people we’re really hoping to catch for an interview._

**_6\. Clint Barton_ ** _isn’t what we’d call a style icon, but he’s always hard to miss. The archer’s fondness for purple stretches far beyond shirts or ties- he’s been seen in head-to-toe purple from hat to suit to shoes before. Our best guess is as good as yours, but here’s betting that whatever he chooses, it’ll be purple._

**_5\. Darcy Lewis_ ** _is a new face on the red carpet these last few events, first appearing on the arm of Captain Steve Rogers at the opening of the Smithsonian exhibit on Captain America. This alpha seems to have her sights set elsewhere, though- the last few events, she’s been accompanied by a beta introduced only as ‘Ian the Intern’. Expect blood red lipstick and an even redder dress from this bombshell._

**_4\. Thor Odinson_ ** _is the Crown Prince of Asgard and does he ever dress the part. Regal reds and brilliant golds make up Thor’s wardrobe. He tends towards longer jackets when he leaves the cape behind but, if you ask us, our favorite look on him so far is a sharp Brioni suit with his crimson cape._

**_3\. Natasha Romanoff_ ** _is the very definition of effortlessly chic, whether she’s wearing jeans and a tank top or the latest Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Valentino… Romanoff is one of the most sought-after celebrities for top designers. Our hope? There’s a new Avengers-inspired Versace collection with an absolutely stunning Black Widow gown…_

**_2\. Tony Stark and Pepper Potts_ ** _. We can’t possibly leave the dynamic duo behind Stark Industries off this list! Stark has become slightly more subdued on the red carpet since mating with omega Pepper Potts- their wedding next year is the most highly anticipated event of the season- but the competition between designers is fierce for who gets to dress this power couple for major events. We don’t know what to expect, but it’ll be fabulous._

**_1\. Steve Rogers_ ** _is the undisputed number 1 on this list. Voted the most eligible bachelor in the country and America’s Sexiest Man, this omega has brought with him a resurgence in the military chic styles that have become his trademark on the red carpet. We’re expecting a modern take on Captain Rogers’World War II uniform tonight from the most decorated soldier in history._

 

***

 

“Captain Rogers! A moment!”

“Steve Rogers! Any pups coming soon?”

“Thoughts on the Smithsonian exhibit?”

“No date tonight, Cap?”

Steve smiles through the shouting and the camera flashes, letting Tony ham for the cameras on one side and Thor boom his answers over top of the reporters on the other. He can charm a room and learned to play interviews with a deft hand, practiced dancing until he didn’t feel the need to punch Hitler at the end of each song, and still a red carpet lined with reporters terrifies him. 

“Tell us, Steve- can I call you Steve?” the reporter at his official red carpet interview asks. “You were voted one of the most influential men of the twentieth century nineteen times while you were in the ice and again every year since. Has it been strange to live up to your own reputation?”

Steve’s smile turns brittle. What feels like a ball of paper thwacks him in the ear- a gift, no doubt, from Clint- and he lets the tension leach out of him. 

“I suppose you could say I’ve always been living up to my reputation,” he quips, ignoring the camera for the moment. “You have to remember that they were calling me Captain America, hero of the war, when I was still an untried boy from Brooklyn. It wasn’t until I saw battle that I took myself even a fraction as seriously as they took me. Today, I live up to a different kind of reputation, but it’s the same thing, really.”

“I wouldn’t quite call storming a HYDRA base singlehandedly and rescuing dozens of POWs just a battle, though. Most people would call that suicide.”

“Most people did. Unexpected plans will get you everywhere, I’ve found.”

“Well, that’s all the time we have,” the reporter announces abruptly, gaze snapping to Tony doing his usual flaunt down the red carpet while Pepper tries not to look like she’s going to murder him on the spot. The Invincible Iron Man, as the papers have taken to calling him, is a better interview to grab at a dwindling readership than Captain America. Steve doesn’t mind. He doesn’t thrive off the press the way Tony does. 

The ball, like most events of its type, is an event that’s almost too massive for the space it takes place in. Patrons of the Maria Stark Foundation mill around in the back gardens, finding secluded locations to make back alley deals and occasionally, try to evade security for a tryst. The grand ballroom is open for dancers- it’s a slow waltz now but, at some point, they’ll play something from the 40s and expect him to dance. Being a superhero hasn’t made him any less a dancing monkey. 

His eyes drift automatically to the strangers in the crowd, evaluating them. He knows, in a passing sort of way, many of the people here. There are celebrities who want to be seen with the Avengers and donors who couldn’t care less about the press coverage but come to all kinds of these events to support the cause. There’s a man probably as old as Steve is who flirts with any lady with white in her hair and a few people who look like Tony does after a particularly long but successful inventing binge. There’s a woman standing next to Fury who could almost be his sister, some men in World War II Veteran hats eyeing him from across the room, and a couple who move just on the edge of various groups. The room smells of enough perfume to almost hide everyone’s scents- it’s polite, Tony’s informed all of them, to smell like anything but yourself at society events- but the serum made his senses sharp enough to catch a hint here and there from the alphas and omegas. Old papers and grease, steel and flame and petrichor, blood and something he can’t quite identify that smells familiar but just a little bit… not _wrong_ , but not right either. He stares at the couple for a little while, catching Natasha’s eye across the ballroom as she stares after the blond woman with suspicion, and shrugs it off. Natasha’ll deal with it, if there’s anything to be worried about. She’s slightly less in demand than he is at these events, whether that be because she behaves like a shadow slipping through the crowd or because she’s mildly terrifying. 

Steve, on the other hand… well, with his serum-gifted bulk and Tony-gifted masterful tailor, he might as well be wearing the stars and stripes. He doesn’t blend in anywhere. Hungry eyes watch him across the ballroom, including a surveying glance or two from the dark-haired man to the irritation of his suspicious date. Natasha’s stalking them now, keeping herself always within earshot while pretending to listen to donors who pay more attention to her cleavage than the Beretta strapped to her thigh. 

Steve circumvents it all for now, claiming a drink from the bartender and finding a group of older donors to let them tell him about all he’s missed. They like the attention- in Tony’s rather more raucous circles, the donors who have given to the Maria Stark Foundation since it was Maria Stark herself at the head have been long-ignored. They’re also more likely to tut over him and tell him to eat more, whether alphas or betas or omegas, men or women, than make poorly-disguised lewd comments about his ass and the narrow span of his waist. The older donors might pinch him every once in a while when they’ve had a few too many drinks and started remembering their glory days, but that’s still better than grabby hands. 

“Geraldine,” he greets a tiny lady in a vivid green dress. She’s the eldest of this group, a beta who always smells of perfume who was a USO dancer back in the day. She married rich and started donating to the Maria Stark Foundation the day it was founded because ‘if that Howard Stark could give Stevie his chance and outfit him to beat the Nazis, imagine what Maria can do for us back home’. 

“Stevie,” she greets him with a smile, her grip tight on his elbow as she draws him into her conversation. “I’d like you to meet Dorothy and her husband Frank, Earl, and my dear friend Agatha with her great-granddaughter Isolde.”

“Pleasure to meet you.” Steve offers his hand to Dorothy first, offering Isolde a very serious handshake before she decides to capitalize on being six and throws herself into Steve’s arms. Isolde clings to him when he stands up, burying her face in his neck and muffling her declaration that he’s her favoritest. Steve smiles at Agatha, letting Geraldine reassure her that it’s perfectly okay, he likes children once they’re out of diapers, while he adjusts Isolde’s weight to rest more comfortably on his hip. 

“You smell good, Mr. America,” Isolde tells him, turning her head so she’s not speaking straight into his skin. “Like Mommy does right before I go visit Gramma every coupla months,” she proclaims proudly. 

“Do I, now?” he plays along, slightly bemused. She must have a good nose to pick up on some kind of detergent on the fabric- it may be only polite to wear perfume at society events like this but he’s found it bothers childrens’ noses when they want to hug him, so he doesn’t. Tony even makes a joke of it these days. _You smell wonderful, Pep, and so do you and you and not Cap, but at least he doesn’t smell like pizza. Looking at you, Barton._

“Mhmm,” Isolde confirms, tightening her arms around him and taking another big sniff at his pulse point. “Last time Mommy smelled like this, I got a baby sister. She’s two an’ she doesn’t look all squished any more an’ she laughs when I play peekaboo with her. I like you lots and lots, but Audrey’s gonna be my bestest friend when she’s big.”

Over Geraldine and Audrey’s shoulders, he sees Natasha step closer to their suspicious couple, take a deep breath, and freeze. She turns toward him slowly, eyes wide, while behind her the blond woman’s head snaps to her date and she begins to bodily drag him from the ballroom. 

“Isolde,” he murmurs, crouching to set her back down, “I think you ought to stay with your great-grandmother right now. Captain’s orders.”

Isolde sighs, planting a kiss on his cheek. “That’s what Mommy always says.”

“You mother’s a wise woman,” he tells her seriously before Natasha grabs his elbow, making excuses to Geraldine and her friends before dragging him away. Steve tries not to stumble after her. Natasha’s stronger than she seems and he can’t quite keep his feet under him smoothly right now. 

“What’s going on?” he hisses under his breath. Natasha’s rushing them through the kitchen and out what looks like a side door, her free hand ghosting over her Beretta before she taps at her subtle earpiece as a sign to him. JARVIS listens to everything at these events, whispering identifications and conversational snippets as they need them. 

Neither Natasha nor JARVIS answers him. 

Steve twists to get one last glance at the ballroom as Natasha steers him towards the kitchens. Tony is standing on a table, waving his hands and giving a grandiose speech, his eyes holding just a little too long on Steve and Natasha before he launches into an even louder description of exactly what his mother would think of the Maria Stark Foundation today. The blond woman is half-hidden behind her date, murmuring something in his ear while his fists tighten and he stares unblinking at Steve. 

He looks… 

It’s wistful thinking, that’s all. It’s all shades of familiarity, things that are almost Bucky in a stiff, military bearing that’s about as far from Bucky’s lazy slouch as can be. He watches all the rest of them pair off into their happily ever afters. There’s Clint and Natasha sitting a little closer than usual after being separated for a mission and Bruce straightening his jacket before going on another not-date with Dr. Ross. Jane argues with Thor about whether Idunn’s apples are a true panacea or bioengineered crop with advanced organic nanobots andTony tries to wheedle his way into sitting on Pepper’s lap when JARVIS locks him out of his workshop and Steve _wants_ that so incredibly much that he’s seeing Bucky around every corner. 

He stills, staring into the dark-haired man’s too pale eyes from across the room, and the man shakes off his date and takes a single step and then another, faster this time. 

“Rogers!” Natasha snaps, yanking hard on his arm. When he doesn’t budge, she sighs, swearing in Russian and shoving her wrist in front of his nose. The sharply artificial note of her perfume cuts through the fog in his head, followed by _family-omega-Natasha_ and a hint of Clint’s scent clinging to her still. “Snap to it, soldier. Tactical retreat.”

“Why?”

Natasha gives him a steady look. They know why, however impossible. 

“Steve,” her voice drops into something soft and a little cautious as she gingerly moves her wrist away and lets the rest of the world flood his senses again. Lightning flashes in the sky to oohing from anyone in the vicinity of Thor and Tony drags Bruce up on top of what must be a table to laud his recent accomplishments in bringing doctors to sub-Saharan Africa with Stark Foundation money. They’re a distraction, he realizes, so Natasha can get him out.

“What’s the plan?”

He’s shakier than he’d like and a glance over his shoulder shows the dark-haired man glaring at Natasha with something very close to outrage, staring after them only because of the blond woman who is attempting to drag him back by his right arm. She and Natasha meet each others’ eyes with a slow nod that Steve recognizes only too well from temporary alliances back when Tony thought Avengers bonding paintball was a good idea. 

“Clint’s pulling a car around.” 

It’s a smart plan. Something triggered this… he can’t quite bring himself to call it a heat, not with his mate dead and their bond in tatters, but whatever it is, it mimics one quite well. They need to get him out of public lest his… his not-heat trigger any other omegas’ heats. They need to get him away from whatever the hell could overwhelm the serum and force him into an unnatural heat. Natasha and Clint are mated, so Steve’s scent won’t be attractive to Clint, and Natasha will have triggered her own heat by dragging him out like this. 

Smart. 

_Shit, Stevie, how the hell do you think we’re gonna get out of Germany with you smelling like that? If you hadn’t stopped being stubborn and let me bite you before I left, we’d have every alpha in Europe trying to track you down._

He can hear Bucky’s admonishment as clear as if it were yesterday. Bucky exhausted the adrenaline of their escape by the time they stumbled out of the HYDRA base and was too tired for all but the most cursory of posturing over his mate by their second day of marching. It wasn’t exactly the most romantic of reunions, no matter what history’s tried to make of it. They spent most of his heat leaning heavily on each other and marching, sneaking away for the barest of moments in the trees when they stopped for the night. 

His hand drifts idly to his stomach as he ducks into the car.

“Going somewhere?” Clint asks with a wicked smile, winking at Natasha. 

“Clint, I love you, but right now I need you to shut up and drive,” she snaps, checking over her shoulder at the loading dock entrance they left by. The blond woman appears in the doorway, clearly using the same escape strategy as they were, for all that the dark-haired man skims over the cars in search of them while she wants to go the other way. 

“Who are they?” 

Clint shrugs and Natasha ignores him, watching over her shoulder as the blond woman drags her companion’s nose down to her throat to block out the lingering traces of Steve’s scent. He resists at first, accepting it passively when she doesn’t immediately release him. Steve turns away uncomfortably. It’s not that he believes in the stereotypes, that alphas have to be big and strong and active while omegas are passive and accepting, but there’s something odd about the direct shift from predatory to passive. 

“Natasha.”

She gives him a dirty look. He doesn’t push her for intelligence often, permitting her to reveal things in her own time, but the can’t-possibly-be-a-heat is rising quickly in him and _he doesn’t have time_. 

“Her name is Yelena Belova,” Natasha says as slowly as if it’s being dragged out of her. “She was my childhood rival, the closest thing I had to a best friend or perhaps a sister in that place, and when I defected she was the first one sent to kill me. I don’t know who she’s working for now, but I doubt it’s anyone we like.”

“And the man?”

“Vanya.” Natasha sighs. “If the Black Widows were the Red Room’s principal dancers, then he was the ballet master. Never seemed to age a day, never seemed to remember who we were, but he was deadly. If he’s active again, SHIELD needs to know.” She mutters something that might be _I really didn’t want to deal with this_. 

“What are we going to do about them?”

“Alert SHIELD. Ride out the heat.” Clint shrugs. “It’s not like we can have them over for tea and crumpets. Yes, please, welcome to our home- assassins currently trying to kill us sit on that side of the table, don’t mind the handcuffs. No, Dr. Banner usually looks like that, what are you insinuating?”

Steve rolls his eyes and curls up in the backseat, trying to stave off the ache in his abdomen that nothing short of a dead man’s touch would drive away. He can still feel his bond, the whisper-thin strands of it that drift off into nowhere tantalizing him with their continued existence. 

_I wish you were here,_ he sends along the bond into the distant nowhere as they pull into the underground parking at Avengers Tower. _I was never supposed to outlive you._

 

***

 

_CONFIDENTIAL_

_CLEARANCE LEVEL ALPHA_

_FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE’S EYES ONLY_

 

_Mission Failure Interview Transcript_

_Reporting Asset: Black Widow Yelena Belova_

_Assets Involved: Winter Soldier_

 

_RUMLOW: Status report._

_BELOVA: I am uninjured, barring the untimely heat sparked by the events at the Ball._

_RUMLOW: And the Winter Soldier?_

_BELOVA: Similar condition, at the time we were separated by the Medical Branch. I have not seen him since._

_RUMLOW: Why did you retreat?_

_BELOVA: Our cover was blown. For some reason, the Winter Soldier was affected by whatever disabled Captain America. The Soldier is scentless, sir, always has been, but suddenly everyone could smell that he was going into rut and that I, supposedly his mate, wasn’t affected. And no, I don’t know what happened._

_RUMLOW: You should’ve killed your target when you had the chance._

_BELOVA: That wasn’t the mission. If HYDRA wanted the target dead, they would have put the Winter Soldier on a rooftop with a sniper rifle or marched him in with explosives and some pretext for a STRIKE team. Instead, you hired me to play house with him and sneak in, to take the target alive with nobody the wiser. You may be willing to send your toy soldiers- and your toy Soldier- into a suicidal battle against the collective might of the Avengers, but I have no such desire._

_RUMLOW: What makes you think you can talk to me like that?_

_BELOVA: The fact that the Red Room knows more about the Winter Soldier than HYDRA ever will and he’d kill anyone who dared play house with him the way I just did._

_RUMLOW: And yet you’re in our employ._

_BELOVA laughs._

_BELOVA: Goodbye, little snake. You’ll have to pay me a lot more if you want me to face Romanova with a full team at her back. Do be careful with Vanya- I would say to tell him goodbye, but I doubt you’d let him remember me anyways._

 

***

 

Heats are _terrible_. 

It’s not so much the heat itself. He’s had worse ones ever since the serum and ones that were potentially more deadly before that, for all that he’s never passed a single one without Bucky by his side. He feels sick more than desperate, ravaged by the absence of his mate, and even the constant presence of JARVIS reading out news reports with the occasional scathing commentary on some scandal or the other doesn’t fill that ever-present sense of loneliness. His teammates- barring Clint and Natasha, who will be locked away on their floor- have all spent hours sitting by his bedside while he clenches his fists in the sheets and bites back the worst of the pain as his body rebels against Bucky’s absence. 

This is worse than separation sickness. 

Separation sickness is the ache that reminds him that mating isn’t a social construction, it’s a biological one, the fragility when he’s separated from his mate for too long, the dwindling of his scent and the absence of his heats. Something made his biology think his mate was nearby and triggered an immediate heat- a measure of protection for their bond, trying to draw his mate close and keep him there after so long separated. Heats- normal heats- are for procreation and, beyond that, for pleasure. For a mated pair, being separated during a heat is nothing but biological punishment. There’s no overwhelming need, no draw towards alphas other than his own, just days spent coiled in bed trying not to scream. 

It isn’t as bad as the serum, no matter how time has dulled the edges of that memory. He survived that, so he can survive anything. 

Almost anything.

Losing Bucky might still kill him. Tony drags him back from a fight every once in a while with some comment about _not so reckless, Cap, the world needs you_. He shakes his head to clear the melancholy, wincing against the inevitable headache. 

Steve stretches cautiously, testing his balance as he pads over to his dresser for clean clothes. His are vile, soaked through what feels like a thousand times with sweat and dried sticking to his skin. If he had Tony’s dramatic streak, he’d burn them, but there’ll always be a piece of him that remembers growing up so poor that throwing anything away is anathema. 

The heat is over.

It doesn’t mean the loneliness is gone. Right now, there’s nothing he’d like more than easy companionship. Maybe he’ll take his sketchbook to Tony’s workshop, watch him throw tennis balls to test his robots and toss holograms around idly while designing his next modern miracle. Tony tends to forget other people are in his lab with him, making it mostly low-pressure so long as Steve doesn’t mind dodging the occasional wrench tossed wildly aside. 

He wanders out to his floor’s tiny kitchenette- well, tiny compared to the opulence of the rest of the Tower, at least. Steve’s floor has a main bedroom as big as the apartment he grew up in, a master bathroom that’s far more for pleasure than simple utility, and two spare bedrooms that aren’t much smaller. His living room has a television built into the wall behind a massive painting of the city skyline as he remembers it in sepia tones juxtaposed against the bright lights and enormous skyscrapers of today’s skyline. 

He pours himself a glass of water from the tap, stretching muscles sore from disuse and considering the bottle of painkillers on the top shelf. They’re a concoction of Bruce’s, something that should be strong enough to act despite the serum’s resistance to, well, everything. He’s just dehydrated and hypoglycemic- with his metabolism, the second one is only too common a problem of his- but he doesn’t keep much food here. 

“JARVIS, anybody in the common areas?”

“Agent Romanoff is in the sitting room, Captain, and Sir is asleep at the dining room table.”

Steve frowns. He hadn’t thought Clint and Natasha would be separated willingly right now. By the time they stumbled into the Tower and got him to his floor, his heat had sparked Natasha’s and Clint barely moved out of arm’s reach of her. 

“Where’s Clint?”

“Agent Barton and Prince Thor, and I quote, ‘are going to Manhattan to raise a little hell and give the tabloids something else to talk about’.”

Steve rolls his eyes, setting his glass in the sink to deal with later and padding over to the elevator. JARVIS opens the doors before he can bother to press the button, taking him to the common floor without commenting on his attire. He’s wearing Captain America pajama pants that miraculously replaced all the pajamas he owns- he hasn’t figured out whether he owes Tony or Clint a prank in return, but he can’t deny that they’re at least comfortable. He has a bad habit of forgetting quite how much he’s changed and buying things two sizes too small. 

“Tasha?”

He yawns, wandering over to the industrial-sized kitchen and digging through the fridge for all the important ingredients for a smoothie. Strawberries and raspberries, bananas and yogurt and a little bit of ice, and all with as much spinach and kale as he can hide in it without making it a weird color. His smoothies aren’t quite so haphazardly slapped together as the ones Tony taught his robots to make, but they also include quite a bit less protein powder and caffeine. 

He ignores Natasha’s footsteps- her walk is unmistakeable here in the Tower, a combination of measured dancers’ steps, the absentminded noises of someone who has been trained to move soundlessly choosing not to, and the waft of accentuated omega smell. The Red Room tailored them to be distracting, she says, so all the Black Widows who survived training were augmented to smell alluring at all times. 

“My, my. I didn’t think you’d be even prettier out of those designer clothes.”

Steve yanks the top off the blender and throws it blind, his free hand slipping into the silverware drawer for some of their perfectly weighted butter knives. He blinks through the splash of smoothie across his face as he turns smoothly- throwing knives aren’t his favorite thing to use but he needs to buy time to get to the Bowie knife taped under the drawer since Tony complains when he uses cabinet doors as a makeshift shield. 

“Easy, маленький тигр.” The blond woman from the Ball- Yelena Belova, a Black Widow, which means if she wanted him dead he’d certainly be a lot closer than he is now- tosses the blender lid back to him, poking one of the knives in the drywall. 

“What are you doing here?” he bites out. 

“Visiting an old friend,” Yelena drawls, her accent disappearing as she walks silently back into the living room. “Do they all spook easily, Tasha?”

“Only if you sneak up on them, Lena. Are you getting coffee or bothering my teammates?”

“Bothering your teammates, definitely,” she agrees, searching through the cupboards for coffee mugs. She moves as smoothly as Natasha does with the same grace that reminds him of the Red Room’s cover story, that they’re all trained in ballet as well as assassination. 

“Natasha,” he calls, grabbing a towel to clean up the worst of the smoothie explosion, “why is the assassin you were worried about three days ago standing in our kitchen?”

Natasha appears in the doorway, her hair a mess of haphazard curls and a holster strapped over her pajama shorts and tank top. She accepts a mug from Yelena gratefully, raising a judgmental eyebrow at the extent of the smoothie splash zone.

“I’m not sure you could’ve made more of a mess if you tried.”

“Shut up,” he mutters, damning his fair skin for how red he knows he turns in embarrassment. “I think Tony gave the blender another upgrade. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Mmm,” she hums noncommittally. Yelena leans against the wall next to her with a mirrored expression of judgment. “Yelena’s been freelancing since the fall of the Red Room. I don’t tell her anything about SHIELD, she doesn’t tell me anything about her current employer, and we gossip about everything else.”

Steve gives up on the mess, resolving to deal with it later. He takes what’s left of his smoothie out to the balcony, unsurprised when both Black Widows follow him out. It seems to be that kind of day already. They stand the same way, backs turned to him as they lean on the railing, only slightly more relaxed than a dancer at the bar. He’s not sure if it’s intentional. 

“Vanya,” Natasha murmurs, glancing over her shoulder at Steve. He barely catches it even with serum-enhanced hearing. 

“That’s very close to things we don’t talk about, Natalia,” Yelena warns equally quietly.

“When I ran away, сестра, you helped me avoid our teachers long enough to find SHIELD and the protection I needed against their revenge, no matter that it would have meant your life if anyone found out. Something is going on. I know it, you know it. Vanya’s almost as hard as Steve to incapacitate and whatever happened there, it took them both more or less out of commission.” Natasha shrugs. “I think we’re both involved in something we don’t quite understand, Lena, and I don’t like it.”

Yelena sighs. “Well, you saw Vanya. He’s the same as always- scentless, completely uninterested in any of us, and he’s only become a colder bastard since they started letting him remember even less. Looks the same as he did when we were… five, were we?”

“ _You_ were five. I was four.” Natasha sticks her tongue out at Yelena and Steve almost drops his smoothie. It’s not that he thought her legendary reserve was much more than a facade in the first place… except he did, he thought that exactly, because even in the privacy of the Tower she leaves the antics to Clint and Thor and Tony. 

Yelena flips her off in return, smiling sweetly. “Rub it in, we all know you were a prodigy, Tasha. In this case, I don’t know if that’s an insult.” Yelena shoves at Natasha’s shoulder affectionately. “Anyways. They only let me close to Vanya because he still tends to murder anyone who isn’t Red Room trained on longer missions and they can’t have you. Nothing else seemed odd.”

They stare over the city in silence for a while before Yelena sneaks a glimpse at Steve over her shoulder. He returns inside to grab a few spare sheets of paper and a pencil so he can put them to paper: their synchronicity in motion as much as in stillness silhouetted against the city, sharp skyscrapers against smooth curves while the light of the morning breaks across it all. 

“When we were little,” Natasha whispers, “we promised Vanya something.”

“He doesn’t remember it,” Yelena snaps almost too loudly, modulating her voice back to that barest almost-whisper a moment later. “He hasn’t remembered that since we were eighteen, at most, probably less than that. We were eleven and children, no matter what the Red Room told us.”

“We’re not children anymore. Do you still think the same thing?”

Yelena sighs. “It’s hard to tell, Tasha. They let him remember so little these days. Vanya was always broken, but they don’t even let him be human enough to be broken now.”

They fall silent again, letting Steve rough in more details. They followed him out here, so he oughtn’t feel like he was intruding, but he doesn’t exactly think he can ask what their relationship to this Vanya is and what it has to do with things they don’t talk about and Steve’s out-of-place heat. He draws instead. It’s easier to fill in the plaid of Natasha’s pajama shorts and the dark nylon webbing of the holster curving around her bare thigh, the way Yelena’s leather jacket is cut just so to hide the shoulder holster he knows she has under it, Natasha’s messy curls and the wisps of blond hair escaping from Yelena’s braid. 

“You’re a sentimental fool, Natalia,” Yelena murmurs. “Six months. That cafe in Prague, not the one with the ex-KGB baker but the one with the excellent croissants? That’s all I can promise. And you owe me a croissant.”

“I’ll feel safer knowing what’s going on.”

“Of course.” 

Yelena leaves not long after that. JARVIS puts the security footage up so they can watch her step out of the elevator and shift, her posture dropping into something slightly slouchy that screams _don’t look at me_ as she disappears into the crowd of tourists that perpetually mills around the Tower in hopes of seeing the Avengers. Natasha sighs, pouring herself a fresh mug of coffee. 

“What was that all about?”

“I know exactly how good your ears are,” Natasha replies, hopping up to perch on the kitchen counter. “I’m suspicious. If you were the only one affected, I’d do some digging on my own, but with you and Vanya both affected? I don’t like it. I wouldn’t trust Yelena with a lot of things, but she came to me because she knew something was wrong and we’re both very good at saving our skins.”

“Humor me. What do you think is happening?”

“I don’t know.” Natasha takes a gulp from her mug, considering her words. “I’m going to request a transfer to DC in the meantime, see what I can find in the Triskelion or… other places.”

“Do you need backup?”

He doesn’t know what kind of backup Natasha would need- he’s a soldier, not a spy, always has been. The closest thing he has to a contact that Natasha doesn’t is Peggy, and she doesn’t remember that he’s alive half the time and asks when Bucky will be coming to see her the other half. She’s always been the sharpest person he knew, better at the political nonsense than he was, no matter how good the serum made him at puzzles and patterns.

Steve turns away, embarrassed. Too late to revoke his words now. 

“Steve, wait.” Natasha slides off the counter and grabs him by the shoulder. “It depends. Do you mind playing the dancing monkey so nobody will pay attention to me?”

He scowls in distaste. It was- and still is- the worst thing about being Captain America. He likes the whole saving people thing, but Captain America has grown into something beyond his actions. While he was dead, Captain America became a figurehead for everything that was right or just or American or brave, no matter whether Steve Rogers would have agreed with it or not. 

“I’ll do it.”

Natasha steps away, raising her mug as if for a toast. 

“I’ll call Fury.”

 

***

 

_Perhaps the most iconic period of Steve Rogers’ tragically short art career is that done at war with pencil stubs and any odds and ends he could manage to draw on. The Wartime Period, as it came to be called by art historians, captures the emotional depth of a man who carried the weight of failing his country and his compatriots on his shoulders more than any smiling propaganda film could._

_The Wartime Period, as a whole, is characterized by these choices of medium. Rogers drew on the insides of cigarette packages, scraps of envelopes from their marching orders, the blank spaces on playing cards, even the margins of the letters Bucky Barnes sent home to his family. Beyond that, the Wartime Period is divided into two distinct sub-periods: the rougher chiaroscuro of what he saw around him, known as the Wartime Images, and the idealized portraits done on descriptions of sweethearts back home as gifts, known as the Sweetheart Set._

_The Wartime Images are the images most immediately associated with Steve Rogers. These pieces were either left behind at the base when he left on his final, fateful mission or in the possession of the remaining Howling Commandos or Agent Peggy Carter. Most famous among these pieces are the deck of illustrated playing cards, the white spaces filled with shadowed drawings of endless forests and fortress walls rising high and the eerie crest of HYDRA, the Nazi deep science division, lurking ever in the background. These, alongside raw images of war-torn battlefields and incredibly detailed renditions of HYDRA experimental laboratories, are housed currently in the Brooklyn Museum’s upcoming exhibit_ The Man Behind the Shield: The Art of Captain Steven G. Rogers _._

_The counterpoint to the gritty realism of the Wartime Images is the rare surviving images from what has become known as the Sweetheart Set. Most of the images that were once part of the Sweetheart Set were either destroyed or remain in private hands to this day, with most of the information about these drawings coming from the memoirs of those who worked closely with Rogers. If he had the time, according to the wartime memoir written collaboratively by the Howling Commandos, Rogers would sit down with any soldier who asked and draw their sweetheart back home from the vaguest of descriptions. The remaining drawings are mostly smeared now from time spent carried as a lucky token, the soft lines of Rogers’ dreamiest, ethereal work blurring into what is barely recognizable as a face._

_The surviving pieces of the Sweetheart Set, composed of the ‘spare’ drawings Rogers did for each of the Howling Commandos, will join the Wartime Images on display at the Brooklyn Museum by generous donation of the Barnes Collection and the Howling Commandos. Early reports indicate that the exhibit may be accompanied by some of what art historians are calling the Brave New World period, composed of modern pieces from Rogers’ first year out of the ice, and a portrait series on life in Avengers Tower donated by Captain Rogers himself._

The Man Behind the Shield: The Art of Captain Steven G. Rogers _will open at the Brooklyn Museum in February. Tickets to the opening gala are on sale for donors to the Brooklyn Museum starting next week._

 

***

 

DC is… lonely.

Clint and Natasha have an apartment here, a tiny little one-bedroom place that belongs to Natasha’s formerly stray pair of cats and Clint’s overly excited golden lab. Steve slept on their couch for a few weeks while SHIELD vetted apartment complexes suitable for Captain America’s safety _and_ Captain America’s public image. 

They have a spy’s version of a homey apartment, full of knickknacks picked up around the globe and not a single photograph that isn’t of the animals. The couch was comfortable, if a little lumpy, and a frankly obnoxious shade of violet that screams as to who picked it out. The shelves are overcrowded with books in all the languages the two of them speak and a few Steve’s fairly certain they don’t, there’s usually cold pizza in the fridge that’s fair game unless it’s the last slice of pepperoni, and Steve taught himself to crochet to work on the half-finished afghan that one of them abandoned when they picked up their lives and moved to Avengers Tower in the first place. 

There, in a place they built for themselves, Clint and Natasha are truly synchronous. They bicker over whose turn it is to do the laundry and how many times a week it’s acceptable to eat pizza, whether carbon steel knives or ceramic ones are better, and Natasha sits on the counter and smiles while Clint mutters to Lucky that anything’s acceptable on pizza but there’s only so many vegetables that can go in pasta sauce. DC is home in a way New York and Avengers Tower, for them, never will be. 

Steve walked Lucky in what Natasha calls his hipster-chic wardrobe, hat pulled down low against the prying eyes of civilians who aren’t quite so used to seeing Captain America in the flesh. Vodyanoy, the dark grey cat Natasha found in the rain as a kitten, stopped trying to murder him in his sleep and her tiny tiger Vasilisa started trying to sleep on his keyboard when he was trying to decide between approved apartment listings. He settles on one while Clint and Natasha are out on a mission, moving in with a helping hand from Sharon, the nurse who lives across the hall, while a SHIELD safehouse team does all the heavy lifting. 

That’s when it gets lonely. 

He got used to the Tower, to his team ever present when the nightmares keep him up or increasingly rarer times when he wakes utterly certain he just crashed the _Valkyrie_ yesterday and needs to watch TV with Clint or Tony until he settles in his skin again. He got used to the mishmash of other peoples’ scents around his home even though he doesn’t leave a mark of his own- barring that one abrupt heat- and he feels like he’s living in some kind of sterile safehouse now that looks like someone lives there when it’s inhabited by nothing but ghosts.

He keeps running in the early morning, relishing the anonymity to run without cameras flashing in his face and the open spaces around the monuments to stretch his legs. If anyone realizes who he is- and they have to, there’s not exactly an overwhelming number of people who can move like Steve can- they leave him alone.

He doesn’t know why he approaches the guy he lapped with a teasing smile and a helping hand. Maybe it’s because he kept up, because he got exasperated and shouted at Steve like he was a real person instead of some kind of ideal. Maybe it’s because he sees a little of himself in him every time Steve ran past and he sprinted to try and catch up. 

“Sam Wilson.”

“Steve Rogers,” he introduces himself, redundant as it is.

“I kind of put that together,” Wilson admits, changing the subject deftly away from the awkward _yes, I’m Captain America_ piece that absolutely everyone defaults to. “Must have freaked you out, coming home after the whole defrosting thing.”

Steve suppresses a flinch. Well. From one awkward topic to an even more awkward one. This was a terrible idea, he berates himself, an awful attempt to be social outside of the people he’s fought aliens with. 

“It takes some getting used to,” he says, stepping away. “It’s good to meet you, Sam.”

Natasha said she’d pick him up so he could run and make it to their morning mission briefing with the the STRIKE team on time. Steve backs away, keeping one eye on Sam Wilson and the other on the road, waiting for Natasha to pull up in the sports car she ‘borrowed’ from Tony’s private garage in Avengers Tower. 

“It’s your bed, right?” 

Steve stops, freezing in mid-step and pivoting on his heels. “What’s that?”

“Your bed, it’s too soft.” Wilson ducks his head for a moment, as awkward about this as Steve is. “When I was over there, I’d sleep on the ground, use rocks for pillows like a caveman. Now I’m home, lying in my bed, and it’s like…” He shrugs sheepishly. 

“Lying on a mashmallow. Feel like I’m gonna sink right to the floor.” Steve finishes. He knows Tony meant well, getting them all the best mattresses money could buy, but even before the war he slept on a mattress about as good as a few sheets of soggy cardboard. “How long?”

“Two tours. You must miss the good old days, huh?”

Steve doesn’t miss a change of subject when he sees one, but everyone deserves the chance to have things they don’t like talking about. Steve sure does, for all that the journalists usually want to talk about exactly those things. 

“Well, things aren’t so bad. Food’s a lot better. We used to boil everything.” 

Steve makes a face, though it’s more for the remembrance of his and Bucky’s admittedly terrible cooking than anything else. They learned better in wartime, when there weren’t any of their mothers’ friends around to sigh and give them some leftover stew, but even then they didn’t have the breadth of ingredients available to them today. Even then, there’s only so much they could do with rations and whatever they managed to hunt when away from camp for a long time. 

“No polio is good. Internet, so helpful. I’ve been reading that a lot, trying to catch up.” Steve pauses, taking a quick breath and settling his smile into something a little more somber. “Lot’s happened, you know- omegas serving openly in the military, for one.”

“Yeah. Um.” Wilson- Sam- sucks in a sharp breath, like he was about to say something, and then drops back to the ground with an _oomph_ and a blush. “Marvin Gaye, 1972, Trouble Man soundtrack. Everything you missed jammed into one album.”

“I’ll put it on the list,” he agrees, scribbling it down alongside the rest of the things Clint and Tony have given him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Natasha pull up to the curb. “Alright, Sam, duty calls. Thanks for the run- if that’s what you want to call running.”

“Oh, that’s how it is?” Sam asks, grinning back up at him.

“Oh, that’s how it is,” Steve confirms. 

“Ok.” Sam leans back on his hands, smiling brightly.“Anytime you want to stop by the VA, make me look awesome in front of the girl at the front desk, just let me know.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Steve promises. He will. Sam seems a good sort- more curious about Steve-the-man than Captain America, at least, and that’s a good thing in Steve’s books- and if a moment of abusing his fame can help him out? Well, Steve’s not above that, especially for someone who acts more like they’re trying to make a friend than trying to impress a minor celebrity. 

“Yeah,” Sam murmurs, gaze drifting slightly behind Steve as Natasha rolls down the window. 

“Hey, fellas,” she smiles wickedly, “either one of you know where the Smithsonian is? I’m here to pick up a fossil.”

“That’s hilarious,” he tells her like she doesn’t use that line any time she gets the chance. He slides into the passenger seat, folding himself up slightly because no matter how nice, the kind of cars Tony likes aren’t exactly sized for his physique. “Can’t run everywhere,” he tells Sam, watching him with no small amount of amusement. 

“No, you can’t,” he replies as Natasha pulls away. Before she accelerates, Steve catches a murmured _shit_ and watches Sam flop back down to the grass in the mirror. 

“Soooo,” Natasha drawls when they’re halfway to the Triskelion and he’s determined that there’s nothing on the radio that isn’t obnoxious, “who was that?”

“Sam Wilson,” Steve answers, staring straight ahead instead of 

“Oh, is that all?” Natasha gives him a searching look while stopped at a red light. “We’ve been here for months, Steve, and this is the first time you’ve stopped to talk to a stranger who isn’t some six year old kid enamored with Captain America.”

Steve frowns. It’s not that it isn’t an _accurate_ statement, but it makes him sound worse than he is. He’s busy, that’s all, and so much of his life is absorbed by giving the media what they demand anyways. He's not Tony, who thrives off the media half the time and manipulates them expertly the other half, and he’s not Clint who doesn’t mind telling the media to take a hike. 

“Natasha…”

“Easy there, Captain,” she demurs, waving her badge at the door sensor to let them into the parking garage under the Triskelion. She leans close while they drift loops through the underground parking structure, passing empty spaces, whispering. “Yelena says they’re calling her in to work with Vanya again, so we’ll have more information in a few days. We run our mission today, we keep our heads down, and hopefully nobody will try to follow us when we go meet with an ex-Soviet agent.”

“Understood,” he confirms. Natasha leans away, pulling into a spot in the unofficial STRIKE parking area between two dark SUVs. Her serious expression falls away, replaced by something teasing as they stride to the STRIKE locker room.

“Captain, Romanoff,” Rumlow greets them at the door on his way out, presumably to the armory.

“Rumlow,” Natasha says brusquely, stepping past him and going to the coveted back row of lockers where STRIKE Team Alpha and the Avengers keep their belongings. They’ve never gotten along, at least as far as he’s seen- something about tension between the top agents culled from CIA and FBI training programs and the Soviet defector. 

“No wonder Barton keeps going on long missions,” Rumlow wonders out loud, holding the door for Steve. 

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re implying, Rumlow,” Steve says tightly, following Natasha in. He won’t give Rumlow the satisfaction of listening to him, even if he has to work with the man. Fury doesn’t tolerate mission failure due to personal matters. 

When he gets to the Avengers lockers- the same black metal as the rest of them, except for the nameplates inscribed on the doors and the biometric sensors Tony replaced the locks with before letting any of them keep more than a spare pair of gym clothes there- Natasha’s half in her suit, back turned to him. There’s some nasty bruising along her ribs that he notices before turning his back, giving her a little bit of privacy. It’s less awkward to have other people around while they squeeze into skintight armor if they give each other some privacy. 

“He’s an ass,” Natasha says evenly, “but he’s good at his job.”

“Still an ass,” Steve shoots back, folding his civilian clothes and setting them on a shelf. He scrubs a hand through his hair- he’d rather have time for a shower before meeting with Fury, but if Rumlow’s already finished changing then they don’t have time to waste. 

He stands a little straighter in the suit, always has, and the shield is a comforting weight on his back. He’s getting better at leaving it for longer and longer periods of time- when he first woke from the ice, he nearly had a nervous breakdown any time it was out of his reach- but it’s just better to have it in arm’s reach. 

“Hurry up, Romanoff,” he calls over his shoulder, skipping out while she’s still lacing her boots.

“Better watch your back, Rogers,” she threatens.

“I wouldn’t expect anything else!”

He gets to the conference room early, taking his preferred spot by the door. It isn’t the safest spot, tactically, but if someone were to attack them he’s the most durable person there as well as the one perhaps most versed in defense. He’s sure they all know why he does it, for what little it matters. Nobody takes his spot anymore nor the ones on either side of him- Clint and Natasha’s spots, whether they’re on the mission or not. 

“Target is a mobile satellite launch platform,” Fury begins the briefing when Natasha closes the door behind her, “the Lemurian Star. They were sending up their last payload when pirates took them. By the time you get on scene, it’ll have been nearly an hour and a half.”

 

***

 

**_Unsung Heroes: Remembering SHIELD Director Nicholas J. Fury_ **

_by Christine Everhart_

 

_The intelligence community lost one of its best yesterday with the untimely death of Nicholas Fury, who took over as Director of the US-based agency SHIELD upon the retirement of its famed Director Margaret ‘Peggy’ Carter. Today, I’d like not to dwell on the as-of-yet unexplained circumstances surrounding his death. There are thousands of theories and, as of yet, the argument for aliens impersonating police officers in the streets of our nation’s capital is exactly as plausible as any others. Instead, I’d like to discuss Director Fury’s great legacy of protecting our country by harnessing some of our greatest assets._

_It was Director Fury, after all, whose most iconic legacy will be bringing together the Avengers. He organized the treaty with Asgard that keeps Thor on Earth as an ambassador, meeting personally with King Odin to sign it. He kept Dr. Banner out of prison and diverted Agents Barton and Romanoff from SHIELD duties. Beyond the simple fact of arranging for all the Avengers to be available, Director Fury worked with the President, with the United Nations, and has continued to work with every agency necessary to keep the Avengers active and effective._

_Secretary of Defense Alexander Pierce said in his statement this morning that Director Fury will be mourned by the wider intelligence community and that Interim Director Maria Hill, expected to be confirmed fully in the position at the end of her interim year, will have very large shoes to fill._

 

***

 

“I know who killed Fury,” Natasha says, staring coolly into his eyes despite the fact that he’s been gripping her shoulders tight enough to hear her bones creak in protest. 

“Your Vanya,” he hisses. “I’m not blind, Romanoff, nor am I stupid.”

Natasha sighs, twisting abruptly to escape his grip. He yanks back on her arm while she twists, losing his last grip on her while her shoulder dislocates with a nasty pop. She has a knife poised to throw in her hand before he has time to reach for the shield, waggling it threateningly. 

“You’re going to have to trust me, Rogers, when I say that I didn’t order a hit on Fury. So what we’re going to do is find somewhere unobtrusive to meet Yelena and find out what the hell is going on with Vanya.” Natasha makes the knife disappear, holding her free palm up for a moment, and then dips her hand just inside her shirt to fish out the flash drive.

“Down your shirt?” Steve questions skeptically.

“It’s not like you’d think to check there first,” she says with a shrug. “I’ll give this back to you if you swear- and I mean on your mate’s grave, Rogers- swear that you’ll stop trying to kill me and listen.”

“Deal.” Steve holds out his hand for the flash drive.

“Deal,” she mimics, handing it over. “Now fix my shoulder and we can get going.”

She’s still holding her arm tight to her body as they leave the hospital, strolling out arm looking like nothing more than a couple in idle conversation. Steve’s dressed to disappear into the crowd- SHIELD’s never seen him in a chunky sweater that disguises his bulk and skinny jeans, hat pulled low over his eyes and a leather bag with faded scratches and scrapes slung over his shoulder. It’s a precaution of Natasha’s. _Whatever you wear to walk unseen in the city,_ she told him, _never wear that to work. We’d be remiss to assume other agencies aren’t trying to spy on us._

They end up at the mall with Steve nursing a tiny cup from Starbucks while Natasha picks out something to match him, adjusting her makeup with the ladies at the stalls in the middle of the hall until she looks a shade too tan and all the angles of her face are different. 

“Hey, hot stuff,” a woman says, sliding into the seat next to him. 

“Here with my girlfriend,” Steve replies immediately, only taking his eyes off Natasha to scan the crowd. 

“Smelling like that?” she asks, slumping into her seat and pulling out some kind of book. “Your girlfriend’s awful far away for you smelling like you’re a day away from full heat. And mated, at that. Shame.”

When Steve turns, Yelena Belova smiles at him over the top of her enormous book of crosswords. Her hair’s a soft lavender purple today, wavy where it’s escaped from her messy braid, and she’s dressed similarly to Steve and Natasha’s styles. It isn’t what Steve would’ve chosen to blend in- he would’ve chosen a hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap- but he admits that Natasha’s right. People will look, but they don’t look like they have anything to hide. 

“Helen,” Natasha crows, joining them. She clutches at Yelena in a tight hug, starting some conversation about her cousin Jonathan’s engagement to his new girlfriend Samantha that she’s absolutely certain will end in heartbreak for them both, but has Jonathan ever listened to reason? 

“Sorry about your uncle,” Yelena says when they end up squished into a corner booth in the mall food court. 

“He was always good to me,” Natasha replies, tracing a _F_ on Steve’s thigh in case he hadn’t been around spies enough to read between the lines. 

They eat quietly, Natasha and Yelena making just enough small talk to put off anyone listening to them, until finally Yelena twists the last bit of spaghetti into increasingly tight circles on her plate without eating it. 

“Vanya,” Natasha sighs, closing her eyes and taking a long, slow breath. “Most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe he exists. The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier. He’s credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last 50 years.”

“Carried out more than that,” Yelena adds, “but he’s good at being unnoticed.”

“The man I saw wasn’t even fifty years old,” Steve states. 

“And the man in front of me isn’t in his nineties,” Yelena offers. “Most people think he’s a ghost story because of that very fact. We know better.”

“Five years ago,” Natasha continues overtop Yelena, irritation creeping into her voice, “five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer so he shot him straight through me. Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye bye, bikinis.”

“Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now,” Steve adds. Yelena chokes on an aborted laugh.

“Going after him is a dead end,” Natasha argues. “I know. I’ve tried. We’ve both tried, when they’ve kept Yelena away from him for a long time.”

“But,” Yelena says, “I wasn’t kidding when I said you smelled good. You smell about a day, two at the longest, away from a natural heat and whatever happened in New York, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen Vanya turn from a mission. If you have any kind of leads, follow them. Let yourself be noticed, raise a little hell, and sooner or later they’ll send Vanya after you.”

The crinkling of plastic makes them all look down to where Steve’s fingers are putting dents in the side of his cup. He sets it down in a hurry, pushing it away before the top can come loose and splash them all with soda. 

“You want to use me as bait.”

“I want to use you as bait,” Yelena confirms. 

“It’s a good plan,” Natasha agrees. “Yelena’s employers already killed one national treasure and made an attempt at another. I, for one, would like to deprive them of the greatest sword I know.”

“And I might be considering the wisdom of something an old friend told me years ago,” Yelena murmurs. Natasha gives her a solemn look, then nods before Yelena picks up her tray and slips into the crowd. 

“As for us,” Natasha says, twiddling the flash drive she pickpocketed from him between her fingers, “I think there’s an Apple store upstairs that suits my purposes.”

 

***

 

_He draws Ma for the first time when he’s four years old, as she tells the story, when playing outside with the local children. It was the middle of summer, in the sweltering days between the allergies that keep him nearly bedridden in the spring and the looming threat of influenza in the autumn, and he’d scraped his knees chasing after them earlier. When she came to bandage him up, he grinned at her with dirt smeared across his freckled cheekbones and pointed down at the stick figure with long curly hair in the dirt, exclaiming_ look, Ma, I drew you!

_He sketches Ma on dirty newspaper salvaged from alleyways, capturing her sunny smile on newsprint that tells of what they’re now calling the Great Depression, shading her curls over rising prices and falling wages. The laughter lines around her eyes appear on the butcher paper when they can afford meat, the stressed wrinkle between her brows on the bills when they don’t, and his handwriting wobbles into_ I love you, Ma _across his arm when she’s at work and he feels like he’s dying._

_He paints her for the first time when he’s twenty-one, almost starving to save up for the canvas and the four tubes of paint, painstakingly mixing the colors to capture the cornsilk-blond of her hair and the blue of her eyes. He paints her on the verge of laughter with a healthy flush to her cheeks and her hair escaping from its carefully-pinned updo, her lipstick just slightly smeared from the way she bites her lip before she smiles._

_A month after he finishes, they lean it against her coffin. Steve sits alone in the front pew, dry-eyed and numb, trying to reconcile the vibrant woman he painted with the skeletal waste the tuberculosis made of her. He gave Mrs. Barnes the painting as a way to remember her childhood friend and never drew Ma again._

_Seventy-three years later, the painting of Sarah Rogers hangs in the Smithsonian, the colors sun-faded and the paint starting to crack. The placard next to it relays the details of Sarah Rogers’ life in bland factoids, ending with the dedication written in narrow, slanted cursive on the back._

_Ma: As you once were, so shall I always remember you. With love, your Steve_

 

***

 

If kidnapping a SHIELD official in broad daylight using only a VA counselor and two of the most wanted people in DC. If that isn’t enough to bring the Winter Soldier out of hiding, then Steve doesn’t know what possibly would. 

He feels bad about dragging Sam into this. They told him as much as they can without betraying the crucial piece- that they’re going to use Steve’s heat to try and distract the Winter Soldier, for all the sense _that_ makes- but it goes against Steve’s nature to let someone go in blind. 

That isn’t to say Sam doesn’t hold his own. Saves their lives once that Steve saw, probably more than that, armed with nothing but a pocket knife and steely determination. It all blurs in the way of battle, a few stark details standing out against the soft blurring of the rest of his memory. 

The car crash, all bright sunlight and a hand plunging through the windshield and Natasha’s weight in his arms. The screams of civilians as they try to clear out only to find their path blocked by SHIELD- _HYDRA, it’s all HYDRA_ \- in every direction. The glimmer of light off the Winter Soldier’s metal arm and the bell-pure ring of his fist against the shield. That scent, something as intimately familiar as it is strange and he wants to blame the rising heat for how he can’t place it. 

The moment he gets his hand around the Soldier’s shoulder, reaching for the mask covering his nose and mouth. 

“Bucky?”

His voice cracks on the impossibility of it. The Soldier inhales, looking down at him like he’s nothing more than a target, like he couldn’t draw that face with his eyes closed and have it give away too much about what he feels with every single line. His eyes narrow and he closes the scant distance between them, taking in Steve’s scent while Steve stands frozen.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” he asks, flesh and blood hand creeping up to the back of Steve’s neck and calloused fingers brushing against the mark there. Steve wavers, wobbling into the Soldier’s chest when he knees give out, metal arm shifting to hold him there loosely while the Soldier buries his nose in Steve’s hair. 

He can’t be Bucky. It isn’t _possible_ , Steve saw him fall to his death, he felt his bond shatter and has felt the ragged edges of his bond every day since then. It isn’t possible, but this man- Vanya, the Winter Soldier- he looks like Bucky and he smells like Bucky and for the first time since Bucky fell from that train it doesn’t feel like he’s missing half his soul. 

“Mine,” the Soldier whispers, almost like he’s still deciding, “you’re my mission, my mission, have to complete my mission, mine mine mine _mine_.”

Steve buries his nose in the Soldier’s neck, breathing in and trying to think through the heat beginning to fog his mind. He doesn’t know how it’s even possible. It shouldn’t be, but Steve would know Bucky anywhere and, Russian accent and metal arm or no, he knows exactly what he’s seeing. 

“Always,” Steve says, making up his mind and using his body weight to drag them both down to their knees, “till the end of the line, Bucky.”

“Drop the shield, Cap!”

Steve’s hear jerks up, taking in the black-clad agents surrounding them. Bucky growls, releasing Steve reluctantly as he stands up, turning to see how many people they brought to take him in. It’s almost flattering.

“Drop the shield!”

He opens his hand, letting the straps slide from his arm, and he’s fairly certain he doesn’t imagine Bucky’s flinch when the shield hits the ground with a mournful peal. He fights back when they force Steve back to his knees, tossing agents into cars until Yelena slips up in SHIELD tactical gear with an apologetic glance at Steve and whispers something in his ear. 

“No,” Steve calls as Bucky’s face goes blank and he lets the agents move him passively, never taking his eyes from Steve but no longer fighting to get to him. “No!”

The needle slides into his neck while he’s still staring at Bucky, the world fading to grey until pale eyes that don’t remember him are the last thing he sees. 

He wakes to the jostling of a van, heavily chained while Sam tries to stop Natasha’s bleeding without the use of both his hands. Two SHIELD agents in dark facemasks watch them, one fingering the baton at their hip and the other resting their hand on their gun. 

“It was him,” he murmurs, still slightly out of it. The serum’s good, but whatever they dosed him with is still taking time to clear out of his system. “He looked right at me like he didn’t even know me.”

“How is that even possible? It was, like, 70 years ago.” Sam asks. Natasha casts her eyes aside, refusing to meet his gaze. She has some kind of idea about the details from her time with Vanya. 

“Zola,” he says, using the name like an expletive in and of itself. “Bucky’s whole unit was captured in ’43. Zola experimented on him. Whatever he did helped Bucky survive the fall. They must have found him and…”

And if Steve had gone back for him, maybe he would’ve found Bucky first. If he’d followed up on that last tiny inkling of hope when his bond didn’t break clean… If he’d pushed to talk about what happened before Steve came to rescue Bucky instead of letting the tide of newfound fame in the wake of being revealed as an omega distract them both. 

“None of that’s your fault, Steve,” Natasha snaps, flinching back when Sam leans a different way to try and put pressure on her wound. 

“Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky.”

One of the SHIELD agents waves their baton, letting it crackle with electricity in warning. Sam slides back to his own seat, raising his red-stained palms in surrender. 

“We need to get a doctor here,” Sam tells the agents. “If we don’t put pressure on that wound, she’s gonna bleed out here in the truck.”

The other SHIELD agent moves in a blur of limbs, striking their partner and incapacitating them. Natasha grumbles something indistinct under her breath as the SHIELD agent pulls of their helmet. Maria Hill presses a hand to her temple, squeezing her eyes shut.

“That thing was squeezing my brain,” she complains, eyes flicking sharply to Steve. “You reek of an interrupted heat, Rogers. What happened to taking so many suppressants you barely smell of anything?”

Steve and Natasha exchange a weighted look. 

“We were trying to distract the Winter Soldier,” he says, which isn’t entirely the truth but close enough that Steve doesn’t feel guilty about it. Maria Hill’s SHIELD, after all, and trusting SHIELD hasn’t gone well for him so far. 

“Is that who that was?” Hill grins. “Not quite as good as he’s supposed to be, eh?”

“He got Fury.”

“ _Well_ ,” she drags out the word for ages, “he tried his best.”

 

***

 

_CONFIDENTIAL_

_CLEARANCE LEVEL ALPHA_

_FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE’S EYES ONLY_

 

_Recalibration Chamber Report_

_Asset: Winter Soldier_

_Observing: Black Widow Yelena Belova_

_Secretary of Defense Alexander Pierce_

_Agent Brock Rumlow, STRIKE Alpha_

 

_The asset has been out of the ice for too long a time. It is unstable and erratic with both physiological and psychological inconsistencies from acceptable parameters. It is the opinion of the asset’s containment team that he be returned to the ice for full recalibration. However, at the request of the Secretary of Defense, the asset is to be recalibrated again and as needed to complete this mission._

_The asset’s containment team would like to respectfully remind the Secretary of Defense that this course of action is likely to lessen the effectiveness of future recalibrations, requiring more regular recalibration and limiting the asset’s utility._

_Physiologically, the asset’s baseline is a near-lack of hormone signature that permits it to remain unnoticed. At this time, the asset is symptomatic of what would appear to be a full, natural rut unlike the artificially induced one dealt with six months ago. The asset fights its handlers, requiring the use of trigger phrases and physical restraints to remain obedient. All omega handlers have had to be removed from the premises and, should the recalibration not fix this physical issue, alpha handlers may have to be removed as well._

_Psychologically, the asset continues to insist that it knows ‘the man on the bridge’ and demands the man’s return. It ignores instructions to continue to insist that it knows this man as more than a target. These behaviors, in a person, would be expected alongside the physical irregularities._

_A follow-up report will be filed following recalibration of the asset._

 

***

 

“Look, I saw enough to know who he used to be to you, but the guy he is now?” Sam sighs, leaning against the bridge railing next to Steve. “I don’t think he’s the kind you save. He’s the kind you stop.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

This is Bucky, after all, Bucky who he’ll do absolutely anything for and then some. This is his best friend and his mate. He threw himself headlong into enemy territory on the slightest chance he might be able to save his mate once and made himself a legend because of it. He’ll do whatever it takes to save him and this time, he’ll have to be whatever that makes of him. 

“He might not give you a choice. He didn’t know you, Steve. He got dragged in by your scent and even then he had no idea who you were.”

“And if you had a chance to change things? If it were Riley out there, would you be able to kill him, having lost him once?”

Sam hisses out the breath he was holding, then punches Steve in the face. 

“He doesn’t know you,” Sam hisses. 

“He will,” Steve promises, wiping away the smear of blood where the serum’s already fixing his cheekbone. “Gear up. It’s time.”

“You gonna wear that?” Sam asks, inspecting his knuckles. 

“No.” Steve grins, something wild and manic that would probably look more at home on Tony Stark than on him. He’s got an inkling of an idea. It’s a terrible idea, but it’s the best he has, and right now he’ll take his chances with stupid ideas. “If you’re gonna fight a war, you got to wear a uniform.”

 

***

 

_BREAKING NEWS_

_CAPTAIN AMERICA ON THE OUTS WITH SHIELD?_

 

_(WASHINGTON DC) This morning, local officials got word of fugitives on the run from SHIELD, last seen in the vicinity of the Triskelion building. Police forces immediately went to alert as SHIELD set up checkpoints and organized a response team to storm a nearby shopping mall. It wasn’t until after a suspicious explosion at Fort Lehigh, an ex-Army base currently owned by SHIELD, that SHIELD issued a warning to the public about their hunt._

_And that, if you ask us, is when all hell broke loose._

_SHIELD is hunting for none other than two of America’s biggest heroes: Captain America and the Black Widow themselves. No comment from Hawkeye, Iron Man, or the Hulk. When cornered by reporters, Thor is on record saying, “I have never felt betrayed by my comrades, no matter what you might accuse them of, and Asgard remains welcoming of the good Captain and the Lady Natasha.”_

_SHIELD forces are on video as nearly executing Captain America and an unknown man, firing squad style, in the middle of the street. Whatever’s going on in SHIELD, we can only hope it’s resolved soon and that maybe, we’ll get some answers about what’s going on._

 

***

 

It all comes down to this.

Insight carrier Charlie, the SHIELD-slash-HYDRA forces locked out where they can and barricaded in other places, the modern glass-and-steel walkways silent but for his panting as he catches his breath. It’s the same bright and sleek design they used all through the Triskelion, refracting light and removing obvious supports until it all looks faintly ethereal and shines.

He aches. It’s the heat and fighting through it, the slowly fading bruises where Bucky threw him off the helicarrier, and now he faces his mate from the other end of the bridge and stares at the uncomprehending blankness in his eyes. 

“People are gonna die, Buck,” he states, his voice echoing around the chamber. “I can’t let that happen.”

Bucky doesn’t move. He doesn’t have that mask hiding half his face this time, doesn’t move a muscle as he breathes in Steve’s scent. It’s the fading last dregs of heat, burned off by the adrenaline and the on-and-off presence of his mate, intoxicating without the overriding need to strip down and have each other. Steve breathes in Bucky’s scent like he’s dying, taking a few stumbling steps towards him before he sees the knife twirling idly between Bucky’s fingers and pulls himself up straight. 

“Please don’t make me do this.”

Nothing.

_He’s not the kind you save._

Steve wants to squeeze his eyes shut, wants to go back to remembering Bucky as he was instead of whatever this is that they turned him into. It takes not thinking about it to whip the shield at him, catching it on the rebound by muscle memory and snapping it in front of him to block Bucky’s shots. It becomes a dance: trying to strike something non-lethal while preventing Bucky from getting in a killshot because it doesn’t matter what Sam says, it doesn’t matter if Bucky’s trying to kill him, _he can’t give up on Bucky now_. 

When the first bullet grazes him, he has to change tactics. Still non-lethal, but he needs to disable Bucky and he needs to do it fast. Throw him over the railing, maybe, just long enough to get the final targeting blade replaced. 

He throws Bucky back, slamming into him with the shield, and this time Bucky abandons the impersonal gunshot and goes for the knife. He’s lightning fast and strong- strong enough to almost rival Steve for strength with that metal arm even stronger- and seemingly unbothered by the scent of omega in distress. His eyes are bright with challenge and for a moment, just a moment, he looks like Steve’s Bucky again. 

Steve throws him away- it seems to be the only thing that buys him any time while Bucky skids across the smooth floor and collects himself. He has access to the right system when Bucky lunges, knife scraping across Steve’s glove without getting and purchase on it until Steve tosses him away again. The right targeting blade removed, he catches the whisper of irritation spiking through Bucky’s scent a second before his fist connects with the shield. 

Bucky roars his displeasure, the first genuine expression Steve’s seen since they dragged him away in the street, and they go over the railing wrapped around each other while the shield skitters away and he loses his grip on the targeting blade. Steve throws him off, twists a second too late to prevent Bucky throwing him and loses the targeting blade against before he ever quite got his hand on it. He kicks Bucky after it, not trusting him with the high ground and Steve’s back to him, and jumps.

Bucky curls his hand around the targeting blade, a triumphant smile curving his lips. 

Steve kisses him. 

Bucky stills in surprise and Steve jerks back, shamefaced. This isn’t his Bucky. He wears his face and has the same expressions, but he’s not. His hand loosens on the targeting blade and Steve dashes off with it, unable to look at Bucky and admit what he just did. 

“One minute,” Hill’s voice breaks through his embarrassment, crackly over the earpiece that he’s fairly certain is cracked. Steve heaves himself up level by level, glancing back at Bucky to make sure he isn’t coming after him yet. 

Bucky’s lying where Steve left him, flesh-and-blood hand lifted to his lips, but the dazed surprise in his eyes fades the further Steve moves from him. Anger wars with cold determination as Steve swings up and he turns away to ensure his landing long enough that he doesn’t see the gun until Bucky’s shot takes him in the thigh. 

“No,” he murmurs. He doesn’t have the shield, doesn’t have any way to defend himself and Bucky’s going to shoot to kill. 

Bucky lurches to the side when he tries to move, unsteady on his feet. Longing flashes across his features before the icy facade returns and Steve can’t watch any longer. He has a job to do and this is the Winter Soldier, this is not his Bucky, and so many people will die if he fails. 

“Thirty seconds, Cap.”

“Stand by.”

The next shot catches him in the gut. Steve’s seen enough of those to know it’s as good a death sentence as a headshot, if a less immediate one. 

Bucky’s aim was always impeccable. 

But not good enough to stop him.

“Charlie lock,” he gasps out, collapsing as soon as the targeting blade clicks into place. 

“Okay, Cap, get out of there,” Hill warns. Steve shakes his head. Even if he had the energy to pull something off and get off the helicarrier, there’s no way he’s going to be able to fight his way past Bucky and do that. 

“Fire now.”

“But, Steve-“

“Do it!” His voice breaks. “Do it now!”

Steve stumbles to his feet, half dragging himself across the walkway to try and get one last look at Bucky. It might cost him his life, or at least what’s left of it, but he wants his mate to be the absolute last thing he sees. Pieces of the helicarrier fall all around them, a symphony of destruction that he couldn’t care less about. 

Down below, Bucky screams, cutting off into a ragged pant as he tries to breath under the beam that trapped him. Steve doesn’t have to think about it. This is his grave, but that doesn’t mean it has to be Bucky’s. 

The leap to get down there is less than graceful. 

Bucky’s eyes are wider with panic than Steve’s ever seen them, fear and confusion mingling with the sharp smell of omega in distress to make a potent cocktail of adrenaline. Bucky strains under the beam and Steve plants his feet, does everything he can to get it off him even as blood stains the white stripes of his uniform darker than the red ones, and when it clangs back down with Bucky free he collapses to his knees in relief. 

“You know me,” he bites out, squeezing his eyes shut to get past the pain. 

“No, I don’t!” Bucky lunges faster than Steve could even try to respond to, striking out with the metal arm. Steve struggles back to his feet, limping as close to Bucky as he dares in the hope that maybe, if he’s lucky, whatever they did to stop him recognizing Steve’s scent will wear off. 

“Bucky,” he whispers, and it’s more of a plea than he’d care to admit. “You’ve known me your whole life.”

Bucky backhands him and Steve struggles to his feet again, losing his helmet in the process. 

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

“Shut up!” Bucky’s swing is sloppy this time, far too sloppy for some kind of master assassin and even too sloppy for Bucky who used to start bar fights if someone so much as looked at Steve crossways. It barely clips him and yet he goes sprawling, his legs not supporting him much longer. 

“I’m not gonna fight you,” he murmurs, dropping the shield and letting it drop out of the helicarrier to the water below. “You’re my mate.”

This time, when Bucky tackles him, Steve goes down easy. Bucky controls their fall, panting wildly with his scent spiking in confusion and panic, more horrid suffocating panic as he stares down at Steve and beyond him to the fall into the Potomac. 

“You’re my mission,” he growls, pulling his punch before it can touch Steve, repeating it with his metal hand wrapping too tight around Steve’s throat. 

“Then finish it,” Steve wheezes. “Because I’m with you to the end of the line.”

Bucky collapses down onto him as the floor gets knocked out from underneath them, the ghostly brush of his lips over Steve’s the last thing he feels before he’s falling, falling, and he blacks out before the river can take him. 

 

***

 

**_Tomorrow’s News Tonight with Christine Everhart_ **

 

_We still don’t know what happened in Washington DC this week._

_The massive leak of SHIELD documents- and those of HYDRA, and wasn’t that a nasty surprise for all of us- doesn’t clear up much about this week’s events. In the coming weeks people will sort through it and piece together as much of the story that was ever put to paper while the tribunals ordered by the President piece together the rest from eyewitness testimony. Even then, we might not ever really know. An event of this magnitude, a betrayal deep in the heart of one of our most trusted agencies, and everything they find out is certain to be so incredibly classified that we never hear of it again._

_What we do know is that, in the heart of his disaster, something rather unexpected happened._

_By now, I expect that you’ve all seen the image that blew up Twitter this afternoon. Among the first responders rushing to the Triskelion and the banks of the Potomac were almost as many people who just wanted to gawk at the disaster unfolding. Instagram is flooded with tastefully filtered images of fire in the sky and a helicarrier ripping through a building, a figure in distinctive red white and blue falling amidst twisted metal and the one with an arm that shines in the sunlight diving after him._

_But that isn’t the picture I’m talking about._

_An Instagram user posted this picture of Captain America, heavily bleeding from a gut wound that stains the stripes of his World War II uniform, lying half-draped across the lap of an unknown man. The man’s face is hidden by dark, tangled hair, only one side of a stubbled jaw visible where Steve Rogers’ face is pressed into his neck. More recognizable is the metal arm, last seen on the man who tried to kill Captain America on the highway a few days ago._

_The image has gone viral, but nobody has identified the man with the metal arm as of yet. A representative of the Avengers has confirmed that it is indeed Captain America in the photograph and that he is recovering in an undisclosed location. They have also confirmed that the mystery man in the photograph saved Captain America’s life by dragging him out of the Potomac, but refused to identify him._

_So, the question of the hour is: who saved Steve Rogers?_

 

***

 

Steve wakes to the groggy haze of doctors who weren’t afraid to use octuple doses to keep him sedated and the antiseptic smell that clings to modern hospitals. 

He lays still for a while, taking in the quiet thrum of music and the dim lights, the weight of someone trying to use his uninjured thigh as a pillow and the comfort of familiar scents. Bucky, still clinging to his skin stubbornly after they must have scrubbed him down, and the grieving scent of Sam. Fading into the background are the scents of Natasha and Clint and Tony, overlaid with what must be the doctors and orderlies taking care of him. 

“On your left,” Sam murmurs when Steve lets his head drift to look at him, a smile tugging at his lips. 

Steve takes as deep a breath as he can without disturbing what feels like broken ribs, sighing it out. He doesn’t have words. _Thank you_ isn’t enough, _you were right_ too close to things he doesn’t want to talk about and the foggy memory of what might have been Bucky trying to kiss him before the floor gave out, and _you stayed_ too obvious. 

“No, seriously,” Sam whispers, “on _your_ left.”

Steve turns his head achingly slowly. Everything hurts and his head throbs with a burgeoning headache, the after-effects of using the sheer volume of drugs required to overwhelm the serum’s resistance to them. Fingers tighten on his left hand while he adjusts slowly to look. 

“Stevie,” Bucky mumbles, his breath warm on Steve’s hand, “tryn’a sleep.”

“Bucky,” he whispers, turning to look back at Sam. “How?”

“He pulled you out of the Potomac.” Sam picks up his phone, tapping at it for a few moments and turning it to show Steve a picture of himself collapsed against Bucky, both of them propped up against a tree at the riverbank. “You went viral, Cap. Congratulations.”

“Does he…?”

“Remember who you are? Far as we can tell. Barely let the paramedics at you, hasn’t left your side for longer than it takes to go to the bathroom. Nearly caused a scene when one of the doctors tried to throw him out of the OR and he shoved his wrist in front of the guy’s nose and told him that if he had any kind of nose, he wouldn’t be trying to separate you two right now.”

Steve smiles, ignoring the way it pulls at his split lip. That’s Bucky through and through- _his_ Bucky. He turns his hand over slowly, gripping Bucky’s hand as tight as he can manage and ignoring his sleepy grumble of complaint. 

“Gets better the longer he spends with you,” Sam continues, keeping his voice down. “It’s been a week and a half, by the way. Medically induced coma.”

Bucky stirs despite how quiet they’re being, waking up quietly. Sam stands and stretches, giving Steve one last smile as he packs up his stuff.

“I’ll give you a moment to yourselves,” Sam tells him. “He drink coffee or what?”

“Coffee,” Steve murmurs, watching Bucky wake up. “He learned to take it black when we were in Europe.”

“Bet he’s never had Starbucks,” Sam says to himself as he eases the door shut, letting it click shut. “Wonder if he’d throw a pumpkin spice latte at me if I didn’t tell him what it was.”

“Hey,” Steve murmurs a little louder, trying to wake Bucky in some way that won’t get him murdered. “Get your lazy ass up, Barnes.”

“Fuck you, Rogers,” Bucky mumbles, burying his face in Steve’s blankets, and then he sits bolt upright. 

“Surprise,” Steve says weakly, wincing when a cough makes his ribs ache. 

Bucky looks terrible. He’s still unshaven and his hair a tangle that would’ve made his mother cry, but the facepaint is gone and there are dark, exhausted circles under his eyes. Steve doesn’t imagine he looks much better after a week and a half in a coma. 

“You,” Bucky states, his voice shaking, “are an idiot. Who said you could get yourself killed- _twice_ \- after I died for you?”

“Who said you could die for me?”

“What was I _supposed_ to do, watch you die because you _dropped your shield_?”

“ _You weren’t supposed to die!_ ”

Bucky chokes on his next words, presses his forehead to Steve’s carefully, watching him for the slightest wince of pain. They breathe the same air until Sam returns, reacclimatizing themselves with each other. They’re safe. They’re safe, safe and together, and Steve doesn’t want to think about everything else that’s waiting for them because right now they’re _together_.

“Bucky,” Steve murmurs, “I’m with you ’til the end of the line.”

“Stevie,” Bucky answers just as quietly, “I followed you into the future, or you followed me into the future, but either way it’s impossible. I’ve been with you ’til the end of the line once and, you know what? For your punk ass, I’d do it again.”

“This is horribly awkward and I’m going to find something better than hospital food to eat in like, ten seconds,” Sam interrupts, “but I brought lattes?”

Bucky slips to the side, burying his face in the crook of Steve’s neck and pressing a kiss to the edges of his mark. 

“You’re stuck with me this time,” he mumbles into Steve’s pillow, pressing the lightest of kisses to those faint scars where he bit Steve the day before he went to war all those years ago. “M’never leaving you again.”

“Never want you to,” Steve murmurs into Bucky’s hair. “Now drink your latte and go take a shower, Buck. You reek and someone should probably tell the doc that I’m awake if we ever want to get outta here.”

“Where are we gonna go from here?”

“Home.” Steve pulls Bucky in for a brief kiss, relishing the little gasp before Bucky kisses him properly, letting him move back only when his ribs start to ache. “We’re going home.”

 

***

 

_Have we got a scoop for you today! Instead of the red carpet, today we’re covering the white carpet at a wedding a century in the making. We’ve been counting down the days with a list of some of our favorite things here at E!: 10 times caught on kiss-cams, 9 early morning runs, 8 baseball games, 7 late-night TV interviews, 6 post-saving the world hugs, 5 romantic evenings, 4 amusement parks, 3 years together in the twenty-first century, 2 heroes from World War II and here we are at the one and only nuptials of Steven Grant Rogers and James Buchanan Barnes._

_So, who’s who standing up for the groom and the groom?_

_Radiant in red, best woman NATASHA ROMANOFF leads the group standing up for Barnes. Her mate CLINT BARTON joins fellow agent at the new- and HYDRA-free- SHIELD, YELENA BELOVA. On the other side of the aisle, best man TONY STARK is standing right behind Rogers. He is joined by SAM WILSON and DR. BRUCE BANNER, the latter who reportedly missed the rehearsal when flight delays pushed off his return from Doctors Without Borders._

_The wedding is being officiated by THOR OF ASGARD, whose authority as Prince of Asgard was ruled sufficient to officiate weddings in the United States two weeks ago. PEGGY CARTER will be walking down the aisle with Rogers, while Barnes’ little sister REBECCA BARNES will be giving her brother away._

_This is one of the most highly anticipated events of the season with invitations going to select dignitaries and celebrities alongside regular people who befriended either groom in either of their lifetimes. No journalists and no photographers are allowed in the ceremony, but keep your eyes on Twitter and Instagram as the reception gets underway tonight!_

 

***

 

“Showtime, Capsicle.”

Tony lounges against the doorframe, red-tinted shades tipped up to reveal mirth in his eyes to match his smile. Steve smiles weakly at him, trying and failing to quell the butterflies in his stomach. 

“You and Pepper made this look easy,” he complains. “I’ve been in love with Bucky longer than I knew what love was and I’m still nervous. Give me HYDRA any day over standing up in front of, well, everyone and declaring my undying love.”

“Normally, I’d prescribe a little bit of whiskey to calm the pre-wedding jitters,” Tony says, strolling over to adjust Steve’s tie one last time.

“You’re not that kind of doctor,” Bruce calls from where he, Peggy, and Sam are finishing a game of cards, careful to keep their formalwear unwrinkled. It’s a good day for Peggy, one where she’s just as sharp as she used to be and where her fingers hitch just enough over the cards to make it look like she’s trembling as she stacks the deck. 

“No, _I_ actually earned my doctorate,” Tony snipes back, same as he always does. “Multiple doctorates.”

“I’m Dr. Tony Stark,” Sam and Bruce chime in unison, laughing. Tony flips them off.

“In my professional opinion,” Tony continues, sounding aggrieved, “you’re a little too preggers for that anyways.” 

Steve rests his hand on the swell of his stomach, pretending not to notice when Tony mouths _shotgun wedding_ at Sam and Bruce. They’ve been trying to get married for almost a year. First it was the astonishing number of interrupted proposals, then the trial of figuring out logistics when one or the other of them keeps getting pulled away to save the world, then Bucky panicking and nearly calling off the wedding the day Steve woke up for their morning run and promptly stumbled to the bathroom to puke. 

The serum, as it turns out, doesn’t protect against morning sickness.

“I’m ready,” he says to no one in particular, heaving himself ungracefully to his feet. Peggy lets Bruce help her to her feet, tucking her winnings away and looping her arm through Steve’s. They dash away to find their places, leaving him and Peggy waiting for their cue, a makeshift curtain between the two aisles keeping the grooms from seeing each other. 

“I’m terrified, Peggy,” he admits in a low whisper when they’re alone. “Not of the marrying Bucky part- I’ve been ready for that part for decades. I’m going to make a fool of myself in front of the world trying to find the words for how much I love him.”

“You don’t have to find the words,” Peggy says as the first strains of music begin on the other side of the door. “The entire world knows how you feel about James. Today is all about the two of you. The rest of us are just here for the free food.”

Steve laughs quietly, composing himself just in time for the doors to swing open and the gathered crowd to turn and look. 

“It’s time,” Peggy murmurs, and they step out into the aisle.

Steve stares straight ahead, refusing to let himself look at the other aisle where Bucky and Becca should be matching them pace for pace. They pass new friends and old- Natasha spent weeks tracking down anyone Steve and Bucky were fond of in their youth and arranged with Tony to make sure they could all be there. Peggy leaves him at the end of the aisle, gives him a little push and goes to sit between the kids of the Howling Commandos and her wife Angie. It’s six more steps until he’s standing before a beaming Thor in Asgardian finery and his golden circlet, the last scrape of Bucky’s shoe coming in time with the closing notes of their processional. 

“It is to my great honor that I may bring together two great warriors in their own right,” Thor begins. “Greater, however, is the sum of the love they bear for each other. It is for this reason that I now ask them to profess their love for one another. Steven Grant Rogers, if you would begin?”

Steve takes a deep breath, squaring his shoulders and focusing on Thor. They aren’t allowed to look at each other yet- this bit is an Asgardian handfasting in ceremony with the paperwork to make it legal on Earth- and he’d rather tell this to Thor and forget about the crowd listening behind him. 

“I’ve known I loved Bucky since before I knew that love was,” Steve begins, sneaking a glance at Tony for a surreptitious thumbs up. “By the time we were sixteen and had eyes for none but each other, I knew that no matter how much I loved him, I would _never_ let him bond me.”

From his side, Tony makes a sound like he’s choking. Steve rubs idly at the back of his neck while the rest of the crowd tries not to laugh. Their actual bonding bite was rendered near-invisible by the serum, just a shade or two lighter than his skin, but there’s clear red marks from Bucky’s teeth before Tony and Natasha dragged them to their respective bachelor parties.

“Everything that we’ve done comes back to one day, to the draft letter that sang a death knell for the both of us. Bucky wasn’t likely to survive the war and I certainly wouldn’t survive the ravages of winter without his help. We were desperate and we were scared and if we were going to die apart from each other, at least we wanted to be able to cling to our bond while we did so. It was our bond that I clung to when I thought the serum was going to kill me, our bond that drove me to mount a singlehanded invasion to rescue the 107th because I knew- I _knew_ \- that Bucky was still alive. It was our bond that brought us back together and our bond that kept us both alive and sane doing so. Sometimes, it feels more like we were parted seventy years than two and without Bucky? Without Bucky, I don’t have anything.”

There’s silence as Steve finishes, the faint echo of his voice dwindling into nothing, and when he glances to his side Sam has the suspiciously stoic look on his face that means he’s trying not to cry. Thor nods solemnly in acknowledgement of Steve’s speech, turning slightly to face Bucky instead.

“James Buchanan Barnes, what say you to that?”

Steve rests his hand on his stomach, suddenly more nervous than when he had to make his own speech. He knows Bucky loves him- he’s _never_ questioned that, not even when Bucky had no idea who he was and dragged him from that river anyways. He’s never asked Bucky exactly when he remembered who Steve was. He’s not sure he’d like the answer. 

“Fifteen years ago or nearly eighty something, depending on who’s counting, Alannah Cleary kicked the shit out of me.”

Laughter.

“She’s here today, and I like to think that if I forgot what she told me that day she’d do it all over again. She gave me a hand up off the pavement and told me that if I ever wanted to challenge her again, I needed to figure out what the hell I was fighting for. I remember slinking back to Stevie that day, curling up by his knees while he drew anybody and everybody who passed by the window, and knowing that I didn’t want nothing else in the world.” Bucky runs out of breath at the end, his inhale ragged with raw emotion, and his next words have the cadence of Brooklyn overlaid on the Midwestern-precise vowels the Red Room taught him that he hasn’t quite managed to drop. “I remember sayin’ she can have the rest of them, Stevie, ‘cause all I ever wanted was you. And ain’t that the truth.”

Steve sniffles. 

“I told’ja that I’d be with you ’til the end of the line and we’ve been there and back a couple times now. Promised myself that if we ever got outta that war alive, I’d ask you to marry me on the plane back to the States. It ain’t quite so funny now but hey, you’re the punk that said yes anyways. So, here we are, standing in front of an alien demi-god and more people than I actually believe we know. You’re healthy, I’m sane, and if the world has magically stopped being at peace since the last time I checked, well, it’s gonna have to wait. I’ve been waitin’ a long time to marry you, Stevie, and now you’re just one little yes away from making me the happiest man in the whole damn country. So how ‘bout that, Alannah? I figure out what to fight for yet?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alannah shouts from the crowd, “you still haven’t _married_ him yet!”

Tony makes the sound like he’s dying again. This time, Bruce slaps him on the back a couple times to make sure he’s not actually choking. Steve doesn’t have to turn around to be able to picture Pepper’s exasperation with him. Tony may be one of his very best friends, but everyone who deals with him on a regular basis wears that face equally regularly. 

“Give me your hands,” Thor commands, holding out a length of ribbon between his own. Steve holds out his left, still pointedly not looking away from Thor while he crosses Steve’s wrist with Bucky’s warm one. Thor twists their hands slightly, lacing their fingers together, and Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand. “By the rites of handfasting, I ask you one last time. Do you swear to love and protect each other, on the battlefield and off it, and to share all the hardships and the join in all the celebrations that come of it?”

“Yes,” they say in unison. Thor beams at each of them in turn, looping the wide ribbon up and around their hands and tying it in a knot. 

“By the power invested in me by my father the King of Asgard and the state of New York, I now pronounce you wed. Now, by Asgardian tradition, you may look at your partner for the first time since becoming your husband.”

Steve squeezes Bucky’s hand tight and they turn on their heels to face each other. 

Bucky is breathtaking with his eyes glimmering in a way he’ll deny to his dying breath and his hair combed back from his face. There’s a single lock of hair falling loose across his forehead and the way he looks at Steve like he’d rather die than look away… it’s the same way Bucky looks at him when he thinks Steve isn’t looking, except this time he is and Steve leans in to steal a kiss without even thinking about it. 

“I love you,” he whispers.

“You better,” Bucky murmurs against his lips, metal hand coming up around Steve’s back to pull them gently together. “You’re stuck with me and Baby Rogers there.”

“And here I thought it was Baby Barnes.”

“Mmm,” Bucky hums, kissing him again. “Guess we’ll need two of them, then.”

“Guess so,” Steve agrees.

Bucky gives him a rakish smile and steals a final kiss. They turn to the crowd, free arms looped around each other, and Steve’s smiling so much that it aches. He leans into Bucky’s side, brushing a kiss against the line of his jaw and inhaling deeply. Bucky hasn’t bothered with suppressants since Steve’s last heat and Steve’s off them completely for another several months. They smell perpetually like each other, whether from their bond or from the fact that they’ve rarely been parted in the last few years. 

“I’m with you ’til the end of the line, Stevie.”

Steve looks up at his mate, at his husband, and smiles.

“I got you back from death once, Bucky. What makes you think I won’t do it again?”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found at nagapdragon.tumblr.com (sorry, I can write but hyperlinks are sooo beyond me) where I keep saying I'll put updates as I write but mostly I just reblog pretty stuff. Come talk to me about anything except bridges!


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